


In Other Words

by FunnyWings



Series: Codas/Canonverse Fics [17]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, F/F, F/M, M/M, Minor Kaia Nieves/Claire Novak, POV Multiple, Wayward Sisters, also wayward crew is here again because i said so, and cas gets to be onscreen, i'm gonna stress the happy ending part because there sure is angst, temporary major character death, the winchesters get to live because i said so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28905555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FunnyWings/pseuds/FunnyWings
Summary: Chuck may be gone, but the story isn't over yet. When Dean dies on a vampire hunt gone wrong, Cas goes against the new hands off policy to resurrect him. Meanwhile, the new order in heaven isn't all it's cracked up to be, Sam and Eileen work a case that brings up old baggage, and Dean tries to find meaning in a world that will never be free of monsters.Excerpt:Maybe Dean is dead, and this is where he meets his latest reaper. Like they think he’ll fight them, still, after everything. Like he won’t go peacefully if it means not setting off the next series of un-fucking-fortunate events meant to put him in the god damn ground.“You’re not dead yet.”And there’s that voice again. Dean turns to see Cas standing in the room with him, or the perfect facsimile at least. He looks hesitant, unsure how he is going to be received. Too bad for him Dean Winchester’s memory is working pretty good again, and he happens to know for a fact that reapers can look like whatever they like. If they think it’ll calm down the person they’re speaking to.“Wow. What is this the gimmick of the week?” says Dean. “You’re not Cas. Cas is dead. Not like I’ve never seen a fucking reaper before.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Series: Codas/Canonverse Fics [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117457
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29





	In Other Words

It is… surprisingly easy, taking his life into his own hands. And it’s also the hardest thing he’s ever fucking done.

Dean Winchester spends the evening after Chuck loses all his power scrolling through job applications, college programs, trade schools, workshop classes, volunteer opportunities… It’s overwhelming the amount of things he could try his hand at now, if he wanted to. He could do anything, be anything, live his life however he wanted. For a little while, all the things he could never want before, never let himself want, seem possible. It is almost too much to think about. As if he is watching someone else scroll through articles about how to start a late in life career change...

About a week later, he turns on the evening news. Miracle (who Dean has decided to keep because the poor guy had nowhere else to go) sits in his lap, head tucked under Dean’s elbow and tail wagging lazily as Dean pets behind his ears. Sam is nearby, watching a foreign film with subtitles on his iPad and texting back and forth with Eileen. There’s an uncertain set to his face, like he doesn’t know whether or not to be happy. Dean thinks he must look the same, because although they’re in the same room they don’t talk to each other. For a little while, there had been no one in the world but them and Jack. The existence of other people, their sudden re-emergence, was simultaneously a great relief and an overwhelming return of stimuli. There were people again. Walking, living, breathing people.

One of those people is a news anchor on Dean’s flat screen. He’s talking about two bodies that were found in Akron, Ohio. Ex-sanguinated, tongues missing, children kidnapped.

That’s when it all comes crashing down.

Sam doesn’t hear. He isn’t paying attention. Too engrossed in whatever sappy thing he’s typing out to his maybe-girlfriend, so thrilled she’s alive he treats every letter of his message like it might be the last thing she ever sees. But Dean hears it. And he knows.

They got rid of God maybe. Or replaced him or however you want to put it. But they didn’t get rid of the monsters.

They’ll never get rid of the monsters.

And suddenly all that fresh found hope drains from him. He closes his eyes. Part of him wants to scream. Wants to quit. Wants to let someone else do it all, because fuck it, hadn’t he given enough? Let some other poor sap get themselves hurt or killed or worse trying to protect people. And then he feels himself relax. Because of course they keep on keeping on. There was never really any other option, was there?

By the time he’s worked through his momentary internal crisis, the news has moved on. Dean looks back at Sam, who is laughing at some joke or other in the French new wave movie (or some joke Eileen texted him about the French new wave movie). So he didn’t notice, Dean guesses. Good.

He wants Sam to have a little longer than he did. Thinking that this changes anything. Thinking that being free means anything more than realizing even if you get to choose, there’s no real options. So Dean will put aside the job applications he’d been toying with and focus on what he’s good at. The only thing he’s ever been good at.

Besides, there is something about Sam in that moment of unguarded happiness that sends chills down Dean’s spine. Maybe it’s the look of victory. The only other time Dean remembers seeing it on his brother’s face like that was when Lucifer was wearing him. Was in that other world, that world where the Apocalypse went the wrong way up the first time around and Satan snapped his neck like a twig for the hell of it.

Maybe it was because that look reminded Dean that no matter how many times they won, he couldn’t shake the nightmares that there was only one way it all really ended.

Call it nihilism. Call it narrative symmetry. Call it whatever you need to.

And so, for the first time since who knows how long, Dean smiles to himself. Really smiles. Because, hey, if nothing else he’s free to damn himself this time. Who says that doesn’t make a difference?

*****

It… it takes Sam a while. To bring up Cas.

Partly this is because there is just so much. He can’t tell what emotion he’s having from second to second, and he keeps waiting for the other foot to drop. For the next danger to rise. For him to trip over his shoelaces and into Chuck’s next plotline.

Beating God, it can’t be as easy as all that.

He feels guilty, when his maelstrom of thoughts rests on Cas. Because when Dean had told him how Cas had died, he’d been too lost in his own grief for Eileen to really reckon with it. And now he’s starting to realize maybe he should have… Maybe he should have talked to Dean a little more. About the Cas loving him thing. And the Cas dying thing.

He just doesn’t really know how to bring it up.

It doesn’t help that Dean is so light and calm. Almost euphoric, if Sam had to put a word to it. He drives them out to bumfuck, Ohio just for a pie eating competition, dropping Miracle off at a kennel along the way. Although Dean is kind of a hardass with the people who work there to make sure Miracle is gonna be well taken care of, Sam is just relieved he didn’t insist on bringing Miracle along. It’s a little ridiculous how much time Dean spends with the dog these days. He starts to wonder if Miracle is a little like a canary in a coal mine. If Dean is waiting for the little guy to disappear again, and he can hold on as long as that doesn’t happen.

So when he does bring it up, it’s only after Dean pokes fun at him for seeming a little down. It feels like permission to break through the bubble they had been living in for the past week. To acknowledge the losses as well as the wins.

“I’m just… I’m thinking about Cas, y’know?” says Sam. Dean’s expression falters and he looks away. Sam presses on. “Jack. Wishing they could be here.”

“Yeah, I think about them too,” says Dean. “And that pain… that pain ain’t going away. But if we don’t keep living, all that sacrifice will have been for nothing, alright?”

“It’s just-”

“Eat your damn pie.”

Sam frowns at his brother. Looks like he struck a nerve. It’s not like he’s not used to this, and he knows that Dean only talks when he’s ready to talk. Which is endlessly frustrating, but pushing has never done anything but make things worse. Still, Sam itches to say more. Question more.

Because it can’t be this easy. It just can’t. Even with the loss, even with everything else, he can’t shake the feeling something bad is going to happen. And now that he lets himself think that, really think that, he can’t shake the feeling that Dean thinks so too. Or he wouldn’t shrug off Cas’ death like it was nothing and look like he’d swallowed a lime when Sam mentioned Jack.

So Sam paints on a smile and pretends not to know something is wrong. He pretends so hard, he manages not to question it when a case comes up. Manages not to question how convenient it is that they’re in the area. Manages not to question that it’s an old loose end from their long gone father, or that they’ll be saving two brothers kidnapped by monsters.

He doesn’t even question Jenny, who he didn’t fucking remember anyway. Dean does though. Then again, Dean’s always been good at names and faces. At remembering people. And after that brief trip down memory lane, it’s fighting. And it’s easy to fall into the familiar rhythm of that. The desperation of a life or death situation in which he and his brother are outnumbered but claw their way to the upperhand.

It’s the same as so many hunts before. Until it’s… not.

And the other shoe finally drops.

*****

Cas hasn’t felt the same since he left the Empty.

The first time he left of his own free will. He fought to leave, to return to Earth, to return to his friends, to… to Dean. And this time, well, he felt like he had been yanked out of a deep sleep. Nothing quite fit together anymore. His son is God, his father diminished, his place on Earth obviated. His only true purpose now is to do what good he can in Heaven, at Jack’s request. And the only thing Cas can think of, the only way he can see forward, is knocking down the walls.

But even that comes with unthought of complications.

He watches unseen at Mary’s strained expression when John snaps at her about something or other. As John flinches when Mary laughs a little too loudly at one of Bobby’s jokes as they spend time at the Roadhouse, Ellen Harvelle side-eyeing her too. Her husband, William, is not here. He died as a demon and rests in the Empty now, having been dragged to Hell by the demons who killed him after his death. Ellen does not know this, but she’s given up waiting and she and Bobby seem to have… something. Which is nice, even if Jo pretends to gag whenever she sees the two of them eyeing each other. All these people with reasons to want to see each other and not want to see each other. It’s a little like Earth, except worse. The beer doesn’t taste quite right, Cas thinks, seeing the unnerved expression on Jo Harvelle’s face as she sips at a drink. Not bitter enough, probably. A lingering effect of Jack’s sweet tooth.

Cas passes through the crowd unnoticed until he gets to the back, where Ash is fiddling through angel radio, little though there is to hear on it. He appears silently, but it’s only a few seconds before Ash realizes he’s there. The man doesn’t jump, but he does give Cas a bleary-eyed look of warning not to touch his stuff. As if Castiel didn’t understand when he was told not to do so the first time. The two of them have a kind of understanding. The understanding is that Ash is intimately familiar with Heaven’s “software” as he put it, and Cas is increasingly mistrustful of the idea that his idea to fix Heaven has done any good or simply created new problems in place of the old. Voicing these misgivings to Jack does not feel like an option. The new God wants to fix what is broken, fulfill his purpose at long last. Cas does not know how to tell the most powerful being in existence that human nature is not a thing that can be “fixed.”

And besides it hurts to look at Jack now. To see the parts of him that are missing. The parts that made him who he was. All just gone. What was destiny compared to the person Jack was growing into, before it was all taken from him?

So Cas doesn’t speak with him when he doesn’t need to. Jack has not even thought to take offense, which wounds Cas more than he’d care to admit.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” says Ash casually, finishing whatever he is working on and turning to look at Cas properly. “To what do I owe the pleasure of God’s new right hand?”

“You know why I’m here,” says Cas shortly. Ash shrugs and turns back to his computer screen. “Is it better or worse?”

“Holding steady,” he says. “All systems fully operational.”

“But the souls-”

“Some happy, some not,” he says. “Heaven’s big. People are still sorting themselves out. The people they want to be close to. The people they want to get away from.”

Cas grunts, acknowledging that Ash doesn’t have anything more to say at the moment. This is still very much an experiment. An exercise in trying to make something better. It is not lost on Castiel that he has failed at almost everything he has ever set out to do in life. If this is going to be different, it is because it has to be. It is because he knows so many who have died young, and he has to hope he can provide some kind of peace for them.

It is because he feels guilty that he gets to live when they don't.

“And some of these people shouldn’t be here at all if you ask me,” says Ash. “A lot of devout bigots, racists, you name it wandering around harassing folks.”

“Where else are they supposed to go?” Cas snaps. Ash looks down, a rare moment of gravitas causing his shoulders to slump.

“Hell if I know,” he says, sounding defeated. “C’mon, amigo, I’m a genius, but not that kind.”

“Yes, well,” says Cas, looking away from the screen, a feeling of profound uncertainty filling him. “Neither am I.”

They sit in the silence of that for a moment. It makes Castiel feel very small, which is almost grounding. It makes him feel alive in a way he hasn’t since the Empty took him. There is a familiarity in being miserable that he almost misses. Does miss, maybe. At least it’s something to feel. At least it’s not the peaceful fullness Jack has instilled in him, as his default state. Free of his regrets, his fears, his mistakes.

His hopes.

A sharp alarm on Ash’s monitor lifts Castiel from his thoughts. Ash clicks on the alert, his eyes scanning the code quickly. Cas waits to hear what it means, trying to hide his annoyance that Ash has purposefully made it unreadable to him by creating his own language mixing Enochian and some coding language Cas is unfamiliar with. After a moment, Ash looks back at Cas warily.

“Winchester incoming,” he says, voice flat. “Of the Dean variety.”

Cas stares at him.

“Al- Already?” he stutters. “But it’s been- It can’t have been more than a week-”

“Yeah,” says Ash, cutting him off. “Bummer.”

Which feels like something of an understatement. Then again, when you’d been dead for years already, Cas supposes a certain nonchalance is bestowed upon the condition. Still, the news left him feeling like an old part of him had been ripped open. A part full of fear, of anger, of desperation… of love. Not the universal kind, the kind that was peaceful and open and huge and all-encompassing. It was that other kind of love, which was fierce and close and fragile. The kind that isn’t considered or practiced, merely felt.

He hadn’t even known that part of him was missing. And now he aches with it.

“So are you gonna file a complaint with the new boss?” Ash asks. Cas swallows, unsure what to say. “Because I’ve been listening in on angel radio for a while now, and it has always been full on TMZ where you were concerned. Leads me to thinking you might have an opinion about this.”

“I-,” Cas says. He feels reduced to nothing in the wake of the enormity of Dean Winchester just being dead. No fanfare, no grand plan, nothing to send him off. Just some sad little death long before his time. The entirely human urge to vomit rises up inside him, despite the fact there is nothing human about him. Heaven is better now. Or in the process of being better, at least. There is no explanation for why he is upset beyond reason by Dean’s death. “I can’t. Hands off.”

“Yeah. That is the new policy, huh,” says Ash, sounding faintly disappointed. “Didn’t really think it was your style, though.”

It never had been, no. Or at least Castiel thinks so in the privacy of his mind. As private as that really is, where God is concerned. He can’t help but notice that Ash is still staring at him, as if waiting for a decision. It’s all Castiel can do not to snap at him again. Because he feels… he feels…

“Where is he?”

*****

Dean doesn’t mark the passing from life to death. All he knows is the sharp pain in his back, the struggle to keep breathing has ceased. The room he’s in is all old-fashioned wood and shelves and cabinets and books in long forgotten languages.

Someone clears their throat. Dean nearly jumps out of his skin when he turns and sees Billie sitting on a dark purple velvet settee. Her finger rests between the pages of a copy of MacBeth, and she smiles at Dean with an amused malice. He stares back at her, itching to run.

“So,” he says. “You’re back.”

“Looks like,” she says. “I think the new God felt pity for me. Whatever his reasoning, we came to an agreement.”

Dean thinks to himself that it wouldn’t kill Jack not to resurrect the person most likely to grind his bones into bread. If the kid was going to be bringing anybody back…

But it’s better not to think about that.

“So,” says Dean. Billie raises an eyebrow. “What is it then? Off to the Empty?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asks, opening her book and settling back into a more comfortable position. Entirely relaxed, as if Dean poses no more of a threat to her than a feather floating through the air. Which, considering Dean is dead right now, probably isn’t that far off. Not like her scythe is anywhere in the room, so at least she learned that lesson. A little too late, Dean thinks with a kind of vicious satisfaction. “You see part of that deal with Jack… It specified a lack of interference on my part in Winchester adjacent affairs.”

“Then where am I?”

“It’s called a waiting room,” says Billie. “Anubis will be here soon. After he runs the numbers and decides if you’ve been good or bad this lifetime. How are you liking the odds, Dean?”

Dean swallows. Well, that explains why Billie is here. If there’s a chance he’s headed back to… Even with Rowena in charge, if he’s going to-

“Come to enjoy the show then, huh?” he says, instead of dwelling on it.

“I feel like I’ve earned it.”

“You were trying to take the kid-”

“Cut the crap, Dean Winchester,” says Billie, eyes flashing as she looks up at him. “I know every spec of the man you are, and were it not for a coincidence of fate your insignificance would be astounding. You are nothing but your father made over, and God himself is going to realize that sooner than you think. I don’t need revenge. I have a feeling your, uh, “kid” is going to get that all on his own someday. All I need to do is sit back and watch. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but your worst ending is coming to you, Dean. And you can’t even say you don’t deserve it.”

Not like Dean has an answer to that. So he says nothing and he waits. He tries to ignore Billie glancing at him occasionally, her eyes heavy with the weight of hatred. He fidgets. He can’t help it.

“This gonna take long?” he asks at last. She turns the page of her book.

“Depends,” she says. “Who gets here first.”

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean-”

“Dean?”

Everything freezes, narrowing to a single point. Dean thinks his jaw must be on the fucking floor, because it isn’t Anubis who has busted through the door into whatever waiting room or study Dean is currently stuck in.

It’s Cas. Oh fuck, it’s Cas.

And it’s as if he goes on autopilot.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he hears himself say. Cas narrows his eyes at him in a way that tells him he’s in a world of fucking trouble, and if he weren’t so numb he might take that a little more seriously. But all he can do is take in the sight of his best friend in the world, whole and real and alive and in front of him and-

And stalking towards him with a determined look on his face that Dean has no idea what to do with.

“Cas-”

“We don’t have time to talk,” says Cas, looking around him and catching sight of Billie for the first time. She acknowledges him with a nod that reads to Dean as a particularly pronounced ‘fuck you.’ Cas glares at her. “Aren’t you going to stop me?”

“Not my problem anymore,” she says. “Fate has a way of working itself out. And the new God, well, I’m sure he’ll have something to say about it all. It’s up to you, Castiel. If you want to cause problems.”

Castiel looks at Billie and then back at Dean. He seems to come to a decision. He reaches out, gripping Dean’s forearm so tight it hurts. Before Dean can even think to reach back, to ask how Cas is alive, to ask anything about what the Hell is going on, everything goes blank. His last thought is of Billie’s dry laugh, as she turns another page and keeps on reading her tragedy.

*****

Sam is still staring at Dean’s lifeless body in shell shocked silence. It doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t know what to do. There are two fucking kids waiting for him to get his act together and go help them and all he can do is stare at the small puddle of blood coagulating at Dean’s feet and think most of the bleeding must have been internal. Think of Dean managing to sputter out a final few sentences, managing to say he was proud of Sam, of all things, before he’d shuddered and passed out. That Sam had hung up mid call trying to get an ambulance when he’d tried to check his brother’s pulse and just felt nothing.

That’s all that’s left of the person who raised him, who protected him, who made him into the man he is now. Nothing.

It doesn’t make sense.

It breaks him in small waves. He has to get the kids out. He has to come back for the body. He has to tell people. God, he has to burn him… it. The body. He has to burn the body.

People will need to know. People will want to talk about it. To mourn. Sam will have to be the one to make the arrangements. Get a goddamn band for the hunter’s funeral Dean would have wanted.

It’s not like Sam hasn’t lost Dean before. Hasn’t had to move on with his life, however that worked. Drinking demon blood or hitting a dog and settling down or just carving out his own place in the world when he was off at college. Before Chuck’s plot caught up to him. But it’s different this time, because they were supposed to change the ending. It was supposed to be the open road and a life stretched out ahead of them, and now all Sam sees is the things he has to do. After that it all seems to go blurry.

He’d take another round in the Cage with fucking Lucifer over this. And if the only thing keeping Dean alive was Chuck’s shitty writing he’ll take that too. In a heartbeat.

But the other thing Dean had managed to say before he’d gone under is not to do anything stupid to bring him back. Not when they were finally free, out from under the weight of years of baggage and deals and favors owed to whichever powerful cosmic force they’d pissed off that week. Free of Chuck and his stupid goddamn story. So Sam is caught between the urge to do something and the dawning horror that that something is just… grieving, Sam stands there and stares and does nothing.

Which is good because in the next moment there is an earthquake so powerful it shakes the foundations of the barn. The ground seems to roll under Sam’s feet, and in no time at all he’s knocked flat on his ass. And then he sees… Cas? Standing there in front of him, something golden and pulsating squirming in his clenched fist.

Before Sam can blink, Cas has shoved his hand straight through Dean’s chest. There is a horrific gasp, wet and shallow rasping, out of Dean’s mouth. Sam is on his feet again before he even knows what he is doing. But he doesn’t get closer. Cas isn’t quite right. He hasn’t been this powerful since… well, maybe he’s never seemed quite like a force of nature barely being held together by the limits of a human body before. At least not to Sam. But now it is impossible to see anything else, and despite himself, Sam is a little afraid.

Cas lifts Dean’s body from where it is impaled on a piece of rebar, leaving bits of flesh and blood and viscera and bone lingering behind. Sam is nearly sick, thinking that those are bits of Dean. That if it weren’t for Cas, it would be Sam pulling Dean off the metal spike, hearing the crunch of his brother’s spine breaking, washing the blood off his hands…

But there is a soft glow of silver light, as Cas lays Dean on the ground and heals him. He touches Dean gently, despite his strength. And the second he lets go, Sam sees the movement of Dean breathing evenly again, and it is all he can do not to collapse in relief. He looks at Cas, who looks back at him placidly. There is a moment where neither of them say anything.

“Don’t tell him it was me,” says Cas, as Sam opens his mouth to say hello or thank you or something to fill the space. Sam stares at him, floundering for a response.

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to… be involved. In earthly matters,” says Cas. He looks a little more normal now. Awkward and uncomfortable and itching to leave. Or to just not have to explain himself. It was familiar enough to get Sam’s head up and running again.

“Cas, he thinks you’re dead.”

“It’s better that way.”

“For who? For you?” Sam asks. Cas frowns at him. “Dean told me, you know. What you said.”

“I’m not discussing that.”

“You can’t just-”

“I don’t belong here,” says Cas, looking away from Sam. “I never have. I’m trying to do what good I can in Heaven, where I have a place. A purpose. I am eternally grateful for my friendships with the both of you. But it’s time I start fixing some of the things Chuck broke-”

“Is that really what you want?” Sam asks. Cas doesn’t answer him, just shifts uncomfortably, as if he is waiting for someone else to interrupt the argument. Maybe he is, Sam realizes. “Did Chuck get his powers back or something? Is there something going on?”

Cas startles.

“What, no. Why would you think that?”

“You look…” Sam starts, but doesn’t finish. Paranoid, he thinks in his head. As if Cas is waiting for a hammer to fall down on him. As if he’s done something wrong and he’s not sure how long he’s going to get away with it.

“I should go,” Cas says, and then he’s gone. As if he was never there.

Before Sam has time to process any of that, Dean starts to stir.

“Jesus Christ, I feel like I just got hit by fucking semi,” Dean mutters, trying and failing to lift himself off the ground. Sam realizes he’s still bleeding. Cas healed the worst of it, but left enough plausible deniability for the lie he wants Sam to tell. Instead of thinking about whether or not he’s gonna do that, Sam takes out his phone and calls for an ambulance again.

“Yeah, sorry, bad service…” he lies smoothly, giving the receiver a location near enough to where they are that when the paramedics get there, they won’t find the vampires’ bodies. It’ll take them long enough that Sam can get the kids on the way and sort out what story they’re going to tell to the authorities. So he does, he tells them he’s sorry, and they stare at him wide eyed and nod and agree to lie to the police if it means they get to go home.

Of course they don’t really have a home anymore. Sam doesn’t know how to tell them that, so he tells them they were very brave instead. The two little boys whose lives are never going to be the same.

They make it to the road before Dean passes out again. The older kid asks if he’s okay and Sam says yes, they’re just waiting for help now. That seems to do the trick, and the two boys stay pretty calm after that, much to Sam’s relief.

While he waits, Sam let’s himself come to a decision. Dean’s gonna be okay. If the thanks Cas wants for that is not getting credit, then that’s the thanks he’s gonna get. Even if Sam thinks maybe both Cas and Dean would like it a little better if Cas bothered to show his face again. Not like it’s his job to explain that just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean Dean doesn’t want the guy around. Cas is still Dean’s best friend, if nothing else. Hell, he’s Sam’s best friend too, not like Cas ever seems to remember that part. Still, Sam knows Dean well enough to know that nothing could make that just go away.

And sure it sucks. That Dean can’t love Cas back that way. But Sam figures in the long run Cas would be okay with that part too. Because when he has bothered to wonder about why Cas looks at Dean the way he does, Sam has always come to the conclusion that for Cas, being close was enough. Or better than the alternative maybe.

But if Cas wants to torture himself, well… not like Sam has the power to stop him.

And if there’s a better reason to keep his role in Dean’s resurrection quiet, then Sam trusts Cas enough to know not to mess with it.

*****

Cas sits on a barstool in the Roadhouse, invisible again. He doesn’t understand why this has become a place to congregate among his long dead friends. Of course, he could ask them, but that would involve showing his face and he’s not sure if he’s welcome. Many of them don’t even like each other. And yet day after day they show their faces and talk and act as if they were still alive. It feels like a performance, and Castiel is starting to wonder what happens when everyone stops acting.

He’s sat there a while before someone sits next to him. He ignores this. No one will take his seat, out of a subconscious aversion, so he sits and does nothing and waits for someone to realize he broke the rules again. Even when he’s largely in charge of it all, he can’t stop himself from breaking the rules.

“I can see you, you know,” says a voice on his left. Cas feels the instinct to jump, but doesn’t let himself. He turns his head and sees Mary sitting next to him. She doesn’t look at him, just straight forward. She isn’t giving him away, just sitting down for a conversation. Cas turns to find John across the room, staring at the back of Mary’s head, confusion and anger mingling underneath a forced grin as he shares a drink with one of his old hunting partners. One of the ones he got killed, Cas thinks. It’s an uncharitable thought, but it also happens to be true.

“I didn’t,” says Cas. Mary nods subtly, toying with the glass of bourbon that has appeared in her hand. She takes a long swallow and then swirls it around the glass again thoughtfully. “You shouldn’t be able to.”

“I think it might just be what happens when you get… got by God,” says Mary. “I guess Jack wasn’t God when it happened, but something stuck. I can see the architecture holding this place together too. If I look too closely.”

Mary looks down at her glass. Cas wonders what she sees when she looks at it.

“That sounds like a burden.”

“It’s fine,” says Mary. “So. How are my boys?”

“Alive.”

“Good for them,” she says with a little smile. “You got anything more specific?”

“No.”

“And how about you?” Mary says, ignoring Cas’ rudeness. He doesn’t want to be short with her, but he doesn’t know who is listening or if whatever is letting her see him right now is something connecting her to Jack too. And he worries, despite himself that if Jack finds out that Dean is supposed to be dead it will force his hand. He won’t get involved, but that doesn’t mean he won’t correct one of Castiel’s mistakes. Rearrange time so that reality plays out as it should have.

“I am… I don’t know how I am,” says Cas. Mary looks at him a little more. “Purposeful, I suppose.”

“Not a bad thing to be.”

“No,” Cas agrees. “Not bad. And you? How is heaven treating you?”

Mary turns away from him again.

“We’re not the same people we were, me and John,” she says after a second. “He’s still the man I loved, but… he had this whole life without me. And now I have this whole part of my life without him. And I changed. I moved on, for a little while. And now it’s like he just expects me to be the same person who burned to death forty years ago and I’m not her. I don’t know how to be her anymore.”

“Oh.”

“The two of us didn’t share a Heaven before all this. Did we?” she asks Cas. “Everything I remember with him there… those were just memories.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe that was better,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s good to see Bobby, even if he’s not… y’know. The Bobby I knew. I get to see my mom. I ran into Asa Fox the other day, actually. Funniest thing.”

“Mary-”

“I don’t understand why I’m not happy,” she says. “I feel like I should be, but everything is just…”

All of Castiel’s fears rush in at once. He is a failure. He is incapable of truly helping the people he loves. The only thing he’s good for is sacrifice. Anything he tries to build just falls apart. He doesn’t understand people. He isn’t people. He isn’t enough. Nothing he does will ever be enough.

“I have to go.”

He’s gone before Mary can say anything else. There’s a mountain range some of Heaven’s residents like to frequent. Cas knows a place near the summit that usually goes undisturbed, and he decides he is just going to sit there for an eternity. Maybe in the meantime everything will just fix itself on its own.

That’s what usually seems to happen. As long as he doesn’t find some way to fuck it up, that is.

*****

Hell is… hell.

There is no better or simpler way to put it. It is a dimension designed for endless suffering, full of ambitious cretins dying to install their own regimes and hapless newcomers (many of them very bad people in their own right) that have yet to be ripped into. It is exhausting to manage on a day to day basis, and even more so since some of Rowena’s subjects have started to openly rebel against her.

Suffice to say, it has been a while since Rowena has focused on anything aside from maintaining her precarious position atop the throne. Not only that, but it’s not as though anyone visits. Not that she can blame them, she supposes, considering it is Hell and all. But she does wonder if it wouldn’t hurt to call every once in a while. Hell has poor reception, but it would be something to hear the garbled voices of the Winchesters or Heaven’s flightiest angel.

So here she is, deep in the thick of putting down another uprising (how her disloyal subjects keep forgetting she knows spells that’ll make their toenails curl in on themselves she’ll never know), when suddenly time comes to a stop around her. Rowena frowns, poking at one of the few members of her royal guard who has managed not to be a total disappointment. When he doesn’t move, Rowena turns in a circle, looking for whatever being has deigned to put time at a pause. And why, more importantly.

“Rowena.”

She spins again. The space behind her that had been unoccupied now holds Death, in all her glory.

“Billie,” says Rowena. “To what do I owe the trouble?”

“A little of this, a little of that,” says Billie. She makes no secret that she’s noticed Rowena is currently dealing with the third uprising against her that week, much to Rowena’s annoyance. “You should look into some of your son’s methods. For controlling the hordes of hell? He didn’t do a half bad job.”

“Well, you must have some reason other than insulting me to justify your presence here?” says Rowena, ignoring the sting of pain the thought of her long dead son causes her. “The last I heard of you, you ended up on the wrong side of a scythe and Dean Winchester. I assume the new God-”

“Yes,” says Billie, cutting Rowena off. The one word held so much malice, Rowena felt a sliver of fear before she remembered what she was. What she had become. So she squared her shoulders and met Billie’s eyes with all the steady determination of a woman who had crowned herself Queen of Hell.

“And does he know you’re visiting little old me?”

“Omniscience comes with the package,” says Billie. Her tone is even, but there is a flash of caution in her expression and her eyes go unfocused for a moment before returning to Rowena. As if she were trying to read a sign in the distance. “But… let’s say his attention is focused elsewhere, for the moment. God is in everything, but he’s not always so evenly distributed. We can speak as freely as we’d like.”

“Then I ask you again. Why are you here?”

“Believe it or not,” says Billie. “I’m interested in coming to an agreement. You see, I remembered that I have something you want.”

Rowena stares at her. She can’t mean- But she- There is an order to the universe, to magic, to Hell. The old God, he put his hands on the scales, tipped the narrative in a certain direction and didn’t care what rules he broke to do it. Jack had come to her, after his ascension and explained that he planned to leave the chips to fall as they may. But Billie has a different modus operandi entirely, one that prioritized balance over even inaction. So it is not impossible Billie might concede to disorder in the short term if it leads to balance as time goes on. Still, if she is offering what Rowena thinks she is offering… 

“What kind of agreement would that be?”

*****

It’s a few days before Dean is cleared to leave the hospital. At first, Sam isn’t even allowed to visit him, and the nurses side eye him as he resolutely parks himself in the waiting room. Eileen has to talk him down over text from just trying to sneak into the actual hospital area and figure out what the fuck is going on.

Eventually Dean is conscious and not high on pain meds enough to confirm that Sam is his brother and yes he’s allowed in his room. Except when Sam asks why the hell he was banned in the first place, Dean just shrugs and mutters some unconvincing excuse. It takes a second for Sam to realize that Dean is lying to him. Not well, but definitely lying. Then again, Sam has a feeling if he calls Dean out on it, he still won’t come clean with whatever he’s hiding.

In any case, Sam has a lie of his own to sell. One of omission, but still.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” Sam says, sitting down heavily on one of the plastic chairs against the wall of Dean’s hospital room.

“Yeah,” says Dean. “Lucky. That’s one word for it. Coulda had nailed by vamps on my gravestone, though. That would have been a fun one for the locals to figure out.”

“Who says I was getting you a gravestone?”

“Seriously? Not even, like, a rock?”

“I didn’t know you wanted one,” says Sam shrugging. Dean frowns, mock offended. “Maybe… maybe we should write wills or something.”

“Kinda morbid, Sammy.”

“It’s what normal people do. I don’t even know if you’re an organ donor.”

“I don’t think my organs are in the best shape to be donated. I’d pity the fucker who got my liver,” says Dean, frowning a little more thoughtfully now. “Though… maybe you’re right. At least for some stuff. Maybe it’s about time Jody got a key for the bunker. Y’know? In case anything ever happened to us. Lotta good intel in there that shouldn’t go to waste. You’re right, that was… that was a close call.”

You have no idea, Sam thinks to himself. But he just swallows and nods.

“Claire’s going to steal Dorothy’s motorcycle.”

“Over my dead body,” says Dean. For the first time in days, Sam manages a smile. Not because it’s funny, but because Dean clearly thinks it is, what with the ‘close call’ and all. “Fucking death traps, I swear. Very cool looking though. Weird Dorothy never came back for it.”

“How is Oz these days, do you think?”

“Who knows if Chuck left it standing,” says Dean. And just like that, the moment of levity is gone. Dean seems to realize this, that their careful silence around everything their lives used to be is crumbling now. And it always would have had to, Sam guesses. But neither of them spent the time between then and now thinking of what the Hell they were going to say. Dean clears his throat, changes the subject. “Eileen doing alright?”

“Yeah. She’s worried about you. I passed her a case down in Texas that Donna called in from a friend. Almost has it tied up,” says Sam. “Figured once you were healed up enough to move we’d meet up back at the bunker. Take a week off and regroup.”

“You mean babysit me.”

“You said it, not me,” Sam mutters. Dean grimaces, but doesn’t make a deal out of it. Likely he knows his best shot at getting Sam to stop worrying is not to get into it and tear out his stitches in the process. Or maybe he’s just tired from whatever they’re giving him, and doesn’t feel like working himself up about it. Either way, Sam knows Dean isn’t going to agree to as much recovery time as he’ll actually need. He’ll want to be up and out there again in no time, despite the fact he very much is not twenty six anymore. As soon as he can walk around on his own, he’ll be itching to take on another hunt.

Because, otherwise, Sam thinks in the privacy of his own head, why would Dean have driven to the one town they’d found with a case since Chuck lost and pretend it was on accident?

Still, for now it’s enough to be relieved the worst didn’t happen. Technically.

*****

Cas feels the call as a light tug, the way a child might tug on your sleeve. It’s insistent, but gentle. Despite the absurdity of the notion of refusing to acknowledge God himself, he considers ignoring it. The call.

But of course, this is Jack. Or well, not Jack. God. But also Jack, just a little. The remnants of the boy Cas had tried so hard to raise to be good and honest and true, who had taught Cas in turn what it meant to be more of… of a father. More of a man, perhaps. Then again, Cas isn’t a man exactly, so much as he is a being not uncomfortable with masculinity, in the human sense of the word. A found comfort he should be trying to distance himself from.

He is an angel now in the way he was always meant to be an angel. An advocate for humanity. An ally from afar. No longer a creature of violence and suppression, but a guide in times of hardship. A helpful ear for earnest prayer. A place of comfort for the faithful.

It doesn’t become him to be selfish. He isn’t really allowed that. He never should have been, would never have been allowed that if it weren’t for the failures of his father, his kind, and Heaven itself. Except of all the human vices to fall prey too, it’s not as if selfishness is the worst one. Especially because that fostering of want, of need, of a self to want things for… it was a good thing in the end. He still believes that. Even if he knows it’s a good thing he needs to move on from, in the new world order.

So he does go to Jack. Even if it makes him… uncomfortable.

The room is white and bare, even the corners seeming to lack any kind of definition. In the renovations, Castiel found a lot of spaces meant to hold the bureaucracy, his fellow angels, needed to be removed to make room for the free movement of souls across the energy grid (Ash’s words) without disrupting the power needed to maintain Heaven. Considering the current and future shortage of angels, the less actual infrastructure, the better. Jack has not considered making more angels, and Cas has not suggested the idea to him. It feels wrong somehow. To replace all those lost, many at Castiel’s own hands. If he is struggling, it is only penance still owed. He doesn’t say this to Jack either.

In the white room is Jack and Billie. Cas acknowledges both of them, his eyes lingering on Billie a little while longer than Jack. She stares back at him, anger seeping through her carefully neutral expression.

“So,” says Jack. “Family meeting.”

Both Cas and Billie frown a little at the phrasing. And then frown at each other, because well… Cas had gotten the both of them torn to shreds by the Empty. Only the once, but still.

“I’ll think of a different name,” Jack says. Cas doesn’t like that. That Jack can tell what he’s thinking. He finally understands why it always bothered Dean so much, that angels could invade his dreams. It does feel like a violation, to know you have no privacy from someone else, no matter your opinion on the matter. “Cas?”

Jack is being considerate. He is letting Castiel explain himself. Instead of taking the opportunity, however, Cas finds himself gritting his teeth. There is nothing really to explain. Something terrible happened and Castiel fixed it. Against God’s suggestions. Orders. Cas isn’t sure what to call them. Jack isn’t a figurehead in the way Chuck was. He largely leaves the universe to itself, and because of that he largely leaves Cas to himself.

Really, what else was going to happen?

“I think I can cut this short,” says Billie, after a period of time passes in which Castiel says nothing. “Castiel broke the rules. Ones he agreed to follow for the greater good. It’s neither the first time, nor will it be the last. So, what exactly are you going to do with him?”

“It wasn’t Dean’s time yet,” says Cas, finally defending himself. If only out of spite. “He’d barely tasted freedom.”

“Your suicidal special friend might as well have run himself through. You think he didn’t know what he was doing? Throwing himself back into the game so quick after beating God himself?” says Billie. “Dean Winchester wants to die. Has for a long time now.”

“Lucky for him we don’t always get what we want,” says Castiel. Billie raises an eyebrow at him. “What happened to your agreement to stay out of the Winchesters’ affairs?”

“Did I lift a hand to stop you from resurrecting him?”

“No. But I’d prefer if you didn’t have anything to say about it either,” says Cas.

Neither of them notice, at first, that the room is darkening around them. There is an unmistakable surge of power that cuts through their argument, and Cas and Billie turn in unison to look towards Jack, only to find it is Amara staring back at them. Jack is nowhere to be seen, and Cas starts to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“I think that’s enough,” says Amara.

“Jack-” says Cas.

“Jack’s still here,” says Amara, her hand gesturing towards herself. The way she says Jack’s name is not without affection, and for a moment Cas almost likes her. Almost. “My turn to talk, though. So. Let’s run this through, Castiel. Every day people die. Most of them don’t deserve it. Are you going to make a habit of resurrecting every living thing that died too young?”

“No,” Cas says. It comes out hostile, and Cas is angry he is completely incapable of hiding his annoyance. It’s one thing to face Jack, another to face Amara, who carved a message into his chest once just to prove a point. Whose rage, however justified it might be, was later taken out through her torture of Castiel’s body. And yes, it was Lucifer at the wheel during that particular period of his life, but it’s not as if he forgot or forgave the pain of it.

“No,” she repeats, seeming to search his eyes for the truth. “I believe you. But if Dean or Sam were to die right now-”

“I’m not interested in this exercise,” says Castiel. “The question you are leading to is the relevant one. What are you going to do to stop me?”

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Castiel,” says Amara. Billie snorts, but Amara pays her no mind. Her eyes remain fast on Castiel and, despite himself, it does make him feel small. “I do… understand. The draw.”

“Yes, I remember,” says Cas. “You were very clear about your intentions.”

“I was grieving the betrayal of the only person who ever loved me and I tried to find someone else who could relieve me of my feelings of abandonment,” she says. Cas stares at her. “I was on Earth for a while. I had time to think. And what I learned is that hurt and loss and discomfort are a part of life. There can’t be easy fixes to that, or it all falls apart again. It becomes a new story, a new narrative thread in a universe already sagging under the weight of Chuck’s writing. We aren’t being cruel, Castiel. There is a reason Jack and I decided to write ourselves out. Or do you want to be the author of Dean Winchester’s life?”

Nothing else Amara could have said would have been more sickening.

“No!”

“But he can’t die young,” she says to him slowly, sympathetically. “Because that’s not his ending.”

“I don’t… I’m not,” says Cas, unable to face the awfulness of what Amara is suggesting. Becoming the new arbiter of Dean’s freedom. Another obstacle. Another enemy. Again. “I’m not God.”

“No,” says Amara, only she sounds more like Jack now. “But I am.”

And then Amara is gone, and Jack stands in her place again. For a moment, he looks young. Castiel doesn’t see God, he sees Kelly’s child. The one he promised to raise, the one he promised would change the world. But then the illusion is shattered, and he is looking at God again.

“Leave the Winchesters alone,” he says, and his voice is firm. He pauses a moment, his expression softening a little. “I’m sorry.”

“Just to recap,” says Billie, and of course she’s enjoying this. Then again, Castiel did stab her in the back that other time. So perhaps a little of this is deserved. “You’re letting Castiel off with a warning. But if he fails to uphold his end of the bargain…”

“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” says Jack, and he sounds earnest. “In the meantime I have universes to rebuild and it’s not easy. Actually, it’s like trying to build a house of cards in six dimensions during an earthquake. So I have to focus on that. But I don’t think we’ll have any more issues in the meantime, right?”

He looks at Cas hopefully, and is satisfied when Cas nods. It is kind, to assume there will be no more problems. Castiel almost believes this for a moment.

And then he feels Billie’s eyes on him. He knows, somehow, that she is waiting for him to fail. That she has a plan in place for when he does. It is that, which allows him to realize the inevitability that something will happen and he will interfere again. This is simply something that is true.

Because Cas knows this, he knows Jack does too. Except God doesn’t say anything more for now. Instead, he will wait for Castiel to damn himself. As it should be, Cas supposes. With free will and all.

*****

Claire’s the one who answers the door when Sam drops off Dean at their doorstep with a broken leg and a bad attitude. Turns out he fell wrong on a ghost hunt and almost bled out while waiting for help. That, coupled with a smaller injury from a vamp hunt gone wrong a few weeks ago means Dean is off active duty until he’s healed enough to not get dead next time he comes face to face with a monster. Claire suspects, though she doesn’t say so out loud, that whatever hunt Sam and Eileen Leahy (who seems to be Sam’s new girlfriend, whenever that happened) are going on is also partly an excuse to get away from Dean’s moping.

Which, great, drop the emo forty year old man on Jody to deal with. And his new dog, apparently. Not like Jody doesn’t already deal with her share of antics. And yeah, Claire is aware that many of those antics are Claire-adjacent, but still. A little familiar considering ninety percent of the time the Winchesters never visit.

Even so, Jody sets up the coach and the television for Dean, and doesn’t complain when the dog (Miracle, which, what kind of fucking name is that?) hops up next to Dean and rests his head on Dean’s lap. Instead, she sits and talks with him for a while, pointedly not commenting on the creature shedding all over her furniture. Which is nice of her, but also makes Claire wonder why it was such a big deal she bled on the same damn coach so much that one time. At least she wasn’t doing it on purpose.

Claire is supposed to be doing research, but she picks a spot and eavesdrops instead. She and Kaia are working on hunting a djinn based out of Sioux Falls, the part that’s actually a city and has a decent victim pool to draw from, but they haven’t been able to narrow down what warehouse the fucker’s actually using. Whoever it is, they’re smart and they’re dumping the bodies away from the killing grounds. The police records Jody’s been able to pull are no fucking help, and Claire’s FBI badge is not something she uses so close to where she lives, so investigating has been a nightmare and a half. Kaia splits her time between studying with tutors to get a GED and helping Claire with the job, and Claire tries not to take that help for granted. Which is why she should be working, but instead she just listens to Jody and Dean chatting.

“Yeah, well it’s not that bad.”

“Broken in two places is not that bad?”

“Docs said I’d recover.”

“With physical therapy and a couple of months rest,” Jody surmises. There is a short silence, and Claire strains to hear what comes next. “Forgot I broke a bone or two recently, too, huh? Miss being young sometimes. Getting to bounce back from everything, not a care in the world.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “It’s gonna take a while, but it’s not like I’m down for the count.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Yeah, but you did call me old, so,” says Dean. Jody laughs. “Haven’t you heard? Forty’s the new thirty.”

“Didn’t know you read Cosmo.”

“The things you don’t know about me could fill a book,” says Dean. He pauses a little again, then adds a little more solemn. “Actually I think they filled more than a couple.”

“Yeah well,” says Jody, deliberately offhand. “More of a romance reader, myself. I like to relax in my offtime. Don’t really go in for horror. And even if I did, not really interested in digging into the nitty gritty details of my friends’ lives.”

Claire knows about the Supernatural books. She’s read two. Well, the unpublished manuscripts for them. The one where Cas shows up the first time. She’d barely gotten through without throwing her laptop against the wall, and she’d had to gank a vamp nest to feel normal again after finishing it. And the one where her dad signed his life away. She’d had panic attacks for about a month after that and never told anyone why. Just the thought of her body not being her own anymore, being stuck under someone else’s will to the point of essentially non-existence is still enough to make her break into a cold sweat.

It’s why she’s relieved sometimes. That Cas doesn’t visit so much. Because she does like him. It’s hard not to. And that makes it all more complicated.

“Thanks, Jodes. For not… you know,” says Dean, clearing his throat. “I’ve been… I’ve been having a rough go of it lately. With Jack who knows where now and, uh, the whole thing with Cas, um…”

Claire goes very still.

“Sam told me about Jack when he called about you staying here, but… Is Cas okay?”

“No. He’s dead,” says Dean. “I, uh, I think.”

“You think?”

“I saw him die. I know that much.”

“But…?”

“There’s no but, I just- He’s dead. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But if Jack’s God, couldn’t he just-”

“I don’t know,” says Dean, cutting Jody off before she can finish. “I- I don’t know.”

“Alright,” says Jody, her voice gone the kind of gentle that she uses on Claire when she is deliberately not pushing for more information. Claire hears Miracle let out a small whining sound, and Dean mutter something to the dog about being a good boy. He and Jody sit in silence for a while. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Claire silently stands up from where she’s been eavesdropping. She feels numb. She feels dangerous. She feels the way she used to feel when Randy told her he didn’t have the money to feed her that month and she needed to stay at whatever fucking foster family she’d been dumped off at. She feels the way she felt when she saw the rift close between her and Kaia’s dying body. She feels the way she felt when she looked down at her father, someone else’s voice speaking the last words he would ever hear from her.

So she breaks the bathroom mirror with her fist.

*****

They’re dealing with a haunting, standard stuff for the most part but with some disturbing disappearances thrown in. They found the case because so far four people have gone missing without a trace, and all from the same small neighborhood on the southern border of Kentucky. Eileen digs up the relevant news articles on a library archive the first day they’re in town, and Sam finds the grave sight by day two. It’s a couple, the Bakers, buried side by side. They died in a house fire. Had a six month old kid at the time too.

Sam hasn’t mentioned. He knows Eileen can tell there’s something off, but he doesn’t know how to confide in her, so he does his best to convince himself that he’s not still living in the story that has controlled his whole life and he smiles at her when she makes a joke and he holds onto the reality of her, wholly herself. She doesn’t need to know about the close call with Dean, or that Cas is acting weird and distant again (or even that he’s alive because she might tell Dean), or that Sam thinks they found a case intimately connected to his own history. It’s enough to fall asleep listening to Eileen breathing next to him, see one hand tucked under her chin and the other reaching towards him. He takes her free hand in his and touches it to his lips, and Eileen turns over and smiles at him, still half asleep. She wraps herself around him, holds him, and Sam lets her pull him close. It’s enough to let go, let sleep in.

And then he dreams about her burning.

It’s too much. To turn up a case like this fifteen years later, and see the restless dead parents of one of the kids that must have died in Azazel’s twisted death match. The screaming souls left behind to fester in their anger and confusion and lash out at the living because they don’t know what happened to them…

And then he thinks of the two boys on the hunt Dean nearly died on. He remembers that moment of clarity, of thinking of course it ends like this, how else could it end? The feeling of a hand forcing his life into a narrative and trying to tie it off with a bow. And he’s so afraid he can’t breathe. He feels trapped in his body, unable to escape.

“Do you need me to call Dean?” Eileen asks him, as he sits up in bed and hyperventilates. He shakes his head quickly, trying to calm himself down. Eileen sits up with him and looks at his lips, waiting for him to speak. He signs to her that he’s okay, and she signs back no he’s not. He manages a laugh at that.

So he… tells her. He tries to sign when he can, and he doesn’t talk so fast and he answers her questions when she misses something. It takes an hour or so to get it all out. When he’s done, she seems to take it all in for a moment.

“And I thought my life was hard,” she says after a moment. Sam laughs again. He doesn’t know how, but she always makes him laugh. “Do you think it might be Chuck?”

“No,” says Sam, but then he pauses. “Yes. I can’t stop seeing it. His endings.”

“I wasn’t in his endings,” Eileen points out.

“No,” Sam says with a small smile. “You weren’t. Well except for the one where you were dead.”

Eileen signs ‘fuck you’ and Sam signs back ‘I know that sign’ and then they both stay still and quiet for a while.

“Do you want someone else to take over?” Eileen asks when Sam’s breathing has gone completely back to normal. “For the hunt?”

“I can handle ghosts.”

“I know,” says Eileen. “But you don’t have to, Sam. We could call someone else. Look for another hunt. Take a vacation. Go get Dean and head back to Kansas. You have options.”

“It’s not… I need to act like things are normal. And it’ll go away.”

“Your feelings will go away?”

“No I-” Sam sighs in frustration. “I can’t shake the idea that there’s going to be another disaster. It just never stopped before and now it’s quiet and I can’t tell if I’m jumping at shadows but it feels like Chuck’s story isn’t finished with us yet. Like it’s waiting for me to let my guard down and move on with my life and then hit me when I least expect it. I keep seeing myself in the people around me and wondering if they’re supporting characters. I keep wondering if I’m supposed to think this, if that’s supposed to make the story better, if I see it coming and I still can’t stop it. I don’t know how to turn off that part of my brain. I can’t stop.”

“Then don’t,” says Eileen. “Why don’t we make a plan?”

“What?”

“You’re not going back to sleep anytime soon,” says Eileen. “And Chuck pulling my strings scares me too. You know that. But I’d rather be scared with you than not talk about it.”

“We are talking about it.”

“Not really,” says Eileen. “You told me what was wrong and then you told me to pretend everything is normal. That’s not talking about it. That’s an emotional hit and run.”

“I don’t want you to have to deal with my problems,” says Sam. “I have a lot of them. And you’re… you’re the first good thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I don’t want to ruin that.”

Eileen smiles a little at that, but the rest of her expression stays serious. Sam tries to smile back but can’t quite manage it.

“I get that. None of this is easy for me, Sam. I spent my whole life alone and then I died. I had to live through Hell with all that regret. When you brought me back, I decided I didn't want to be alone anymore. I didn’t want to be afraid of wanting more than I’d had. Of wanting you. But we’re not going to work if you don’t work with me. I need a partner, not a protector. So let’s make a plan. For what we do if you’re right and Chuck isn’t as human as we think he is. And if we don’t need it, no harm, no foul.”

Sam sits with that for a moment. It’s been a while since he’s felt so small. Even with everything with Chuck, there wasn’t really room to doubt himself. Not when he knew that Dean and Jack and even Cas needed him to be the one who believed they could win. Because someone had to, and it was his turn. Or something. So he hadn’t let himself feel the bigness of it all.

It’s easier to see it now, with Eileen. Because she is somehow normal despite everything else. She makes Sam feel like a person again. Makes him feel like he doesn’t have to be more than that. Like being a person and with her and living his life is enough all on its own.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s make a plan. For the hunt, tonight. And then when we finish that, we’ll tackle Chuck.”

“Okay,” says Eileen back.

So they do.

*****

It’s Kaia that finally gets Claire to open her bedroom door. Jody tells Dean there’s only one hole punched into the drywall so it could be worse. Turns out Claire has breakdowns sometimes, which is something Dean feels like he should have known. It makes him feel like shit that he set off this particular episode, even if it was by accident.

It’s surprising, how normal they all act in the wake of the incident. Patience and Jody make dinner, Alex talks about the patients she worked with that day, Kaia scrolls through article after article looking for the djinn she and Claire have been tracking, absentmindedly stroking Claire’s hair with her free hand. Claire sits on the floor, eyes closed, her head leaning against Kaia’s leg. Her hands lie flat on the floor and she mouths words to herself like a mantra.

Donna and her niece, Wendy, show up for dinner. When Wendy gets there, she hugs Claire immediately and Claire hugs back without reservation. Wendy nods at Kaia, who smiles at her a little hesitantly. Dean senses there is a little more to the story between the three of them, but whatever it is seems resolved. All of them have settled into something comfortable and familiar, supporting each other without a thought. Seeing Jody and Donna and the girls all alive and taking care of each other, like some twisted but good Leave it to Beaver reboot opens up something in Dean’s chest that makes it hard to swallow.

Jody and Donna have to drag in a fold up table from the garage to make room for everyone, and the girls end up playing musical chairs to see who gets to spend dinner in the shitty plastic ones (Alex and Kaia take one for the team). Dean has to sit at the end so he has room for his leg to hang awkwardly out to the side in his plaster cast. There’s a cushion on his chair that Jody got without him asking (because apparently he’s not as good at hiding his pain as he used to be, and that vamp really fucked up his back). Miracle wanders under the table, resting his head on everyone’s laps and whining for leftovers only Donna is soft enough to slip him.

It’s nice. Dean feels... comfortable. He’s got a glass of red wine and Patience is telling a hilarious story about some girl who came into the on-campus psychic stall she hosts (for a small fee) asking her to figure out the next time it was gonna rain and being furious that Patience was right five days later. Apparently this set off a series of events in which Patience is pretty sure she now has a nemesis and doesn’t know how to get Katie, who is very determined to prove Patience is a fraud, to move on with her life and stop visiting her every day. She does appreciate the extra pocket change her newest regular is bringing in though. And then Donna and Jody are doing dueling impressions of their coworkers, and Dean nearly spurts wine out of his nose busting up and-

He hates it. He wants to leave.

To stop himself from texting Sam to get him the hell out of here (and doing the equivalent of being a teenage girl at a sleepover begging to be picked up), Dean shoves this feeling down and gets quiet for the rest of dinner. He flashes a smile every once in a while, but tunes out Alex and Patience snarking back and forth about who was supposed to clean up the latest monster dissection in the garage. He also pointedly ignores the occasional looks he gets from Claire, who is uncharacteristically silent all through dinner, only really talking to Kaia and Wendy. She jumps in to side with Patience against Alex in some dispute or other and then goes back to quietly picking at her food and paying too much attention to Dean.

After dinner, Claire and Kaia clear the table while Donna and Jody work on rinsing off the dishes and loading the dishwasher. When they’re done, Donna and Wendy say their goodbyes and head home, and Jody and the rest of the girls migrate to the living room where Dean has been designated a couch. Jody tried to offer him one of the girls’ rooms, since he was recovering and all, but Dean had told her not to bother. He’s already embarrassed enough that he’s being left at Jody’s because Sam doesn’t trust him to stay out of trouble by himself, he doesn’t need special treatment too.

They tune into Some Like it Hot because it’s on some random channel and Jody is still paying for cable for some reason, and mostly everyone talks over the movie. Dean finds himself watching Claire and Kaia instead of the screen. The way Kaia rests her head on Claire’s shoulder and whispers in her ear and strokes Claire’s arm like it’s a nervous habit. The way Claire leans into her, the way Kaia draws out her first smile of the night. The way Claire tells Kaia she loves her, quiet and certain and without reservation…

Dean feels like he’s swallowing glass.

He pushes himself up from the couch, reaching for his crutches. Tells Miracle to sit, when the little guy tries to follow him and tells everyone else he needs a bathroom break. There’s something strained about his voice, but he gets out of dodge before anyone can question him and stumbles off to the first floor bathroom.

Soon as he’s in he jiggles the lock and flips the light switch, turning to face the mirror. He lets his crutches fall down in a clatter and yanks off his henley, and then just stares at his reflection.

It’s still there.

When Dean woke up in the hospital after the vamp case, he was asked by the nurse tending to him if he was a victim of trafficking. Which was definitely a way to knock him out of the haze of pain medication he’d been lost in. The first thing that went through Dean’s head was how he’d supplemented his funds in his early twenties when credit card scams weren’t cutting it and he’d been left to his own devices, and that he’s pretty sure the kind of thing he’d been up to didn’t count, and how would they know about that anyway? The second thing that went through his head was that he was pretty sure he’d just had a near death experience, emphasis on the near. The third thing, and the thing that actually came out of his mouth was: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

So the dude had gotten a mirror and showed him. And Dean had… Dean nearly lost it then and there. But then he realized that if he didn’t make a convincing enough explanation for why it was there, the hospital was gonna get some kind of authority involved, and the last thing Dean needed was to get recognized as that Dean Winchester who was supposed to be dead three times over. So he came up with a crock of bullshit, easy as that. Like when he was a kid, and some teacher or other of Sam’s got a little too nosy about where John Winchester was spending ninety percent of his time, Dean went on autopilot. He laughed, rolled his eyes. Said he lost a bet with a loan shark and not to worry about it. The nurse had wrinkled his nose in obvious contempt, all sympathy gone. Dean managed to make him promise not to let slip to his little brother about the whole thing, figuring Sam hadn’t left the waiting room since he’d been admitted and was dying to see Dean was okay. About an hour later, Sam was allowed to visit and he didn’t mention it, so Dean figured he was in the clear. And then he kept not mentioning it. It being the patch of shiny burned flesh right over where his heart should be, raised and red and angry. A brand.

A fucking handprint.

Dean feels like he’s losing his fucking mind. He just stares and stares and tries not to think too hard about it, because if he does he thinks he might just walk into the fucking ocean. Or something along those lines.

There’s a knock on the door that it takes him a little too long to process it. When he does, he still doesn’t say anything, hoping whoever it is has the good sense to go away.

“You okay?”

It’s Claire. Of course it is.

“Peachy,” Dean mutters, resisting the urge to tell her to leave him the fuck alone. “Didn’t know taking a shit was cause for concern.”

“We thought you might have fallen in. It’s been like twenty minutes,” Claire snarks back. Dean can practically hear her rolling her eyes through the wooden door. “Jody’s making popcorn, she wanted to know if you wanted some.”

“Jesus, gimme a second, would ya?” he says, running the sink and splashing some water on his face.

“I could ask her to lace your bowl with laxatives or something. Jody’s discreet like that.”

“Haha, someone’s a comedian.”

He tries to reach down to get his shirt so he can go back to playing house with his friends who actually have their lives somewhat together, but trips over his crutches as he bends down to get it. He tries to catch himself on the lip of the bathtub, but ends up smashing the side of his head into it before he can stop his fall (which hurts like a motherfucker, for the record). Next second he’s sprawled on the floor, cursing up a storm and before he knows it the door is open and Claire has a switchblade in her hands and is looking around in a panic because of course she is. If there’s one thing the two of them have in common, it’s being a little too trigger happy when it comes to the whole monster thing, as unlikely as it is that something would decide to go after Dean in Jody Mills’ fucking first floor bathroom. But hey, not like it’s impossible.

Seeing there are no monsters to fight, and Dean just fell over his own feet, Claire goes bright red and starts to close the door again, apologizing as she does so. But then she freezes. Dean meets her eyes and then looks down at his own chest and for a second neither of them say anything. A series of emotions run over Claire’s face, disbelief, betrayal, hope, relief, anger, and then finally just confusion. Like she has no idea what to do with this. Dean doesn’t either.

“So…” she says at last, swallowing hard and stowing her switchblade. She’s silent for a couple of seconds after that, gathering her thoughts. Her hands clench into fists and Dean kinda hopes she punches him. It would be something to feel at least. “Working theory?”

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to see me,” says Dean a little flippantly, and it feels like a dam breaking. “But I’ve been running through the list.”

“Gotcha,” she says. “And dead is theory number one because…?”

“Because,” Dean says, which isn’t much of a response. He finally manages to convince his limbs to move, so he sits up and tugs his shirt back over his head, hiding the burn mark. Claire is still staring at him, daring him not to bring it up. “It doesn’t mean it’s him.”

“Right,” she says. Then her face goes white. “You, uh, you died.”

“Looks like, huh. Still doesn’t stick. I guess the warranty hasn’t run out yet,” Dean says, gesturing towards himself. His body, his meatsuit, his vessel, whatever you wanna call it. Claire doesn’t smile, and why would she? She knows what he really means. One of the few who could.

“I figured that sorta thing didn’t happen anymore,” she says. She sounds uncertain. On the edge of angry, like she doesn’t quite know what to be angry about. “Or you would have mentioned something to Jody. About trying to get him back.”

Dean looks away from her. Because even if Jack hadn’t made it clear the way it was gonna go from now on, Dean still wouldn’t have asked. Not like he’s gonna spill his guts to Claire why though.

“So which ones did you read?” he says instead, pointedly. Because she knows too much not to have picked up a few things from the goddamned (literally) Winchester Gospels, and it’s not as if he’s too fucked up to be a little bitter about it. And that makes Claire look away.

“Lazarus Rising,” she says quietly. “The Rapture.”

Well, Dean guesses he can’t blame her for that, then. Not like he hasn’t gone searching for missing pieces of his own father, trying to figure out some way to make his dad whole again. To justify the shambles his choices left Dean’s life in. Then again, Dean never read any of Chuck’s books, except the first couple, even for that. Snooped through what people had to say about them sure, looked up the gist of a few that stood out but… The thought of reading any more of Chuck’s shitty writing makes him want to vomit. Even more so now.

“Makes sense,” he says. “You’re in that second one, aren’t you.”

It’s not a question.

“Yeah,” she says, voice gone cold. “I make a cameo.”

And then there’s nothing really left to say. Claire lifts Dean’s crutches off the ground and helps him to his feet. Dean gets his legs back under him and ignores the throbbing in his head and tries to pretend that he can keep ignoring the rest of it. Like he isn’t crawling out of his skin trying to figure it out. Like there aren’t a thousand half thought out prayers rattling around in his brain at any second, ranging from telling Cas to go fuck off for eternity for all he cares to begging the stupid asshole to just… just let him say goodbye. At least.

And then, as always, it hits him again that maybe Cas really is just dead. Maybe Jack brought Dean back (or maybe he was never dead at all, not like Sam ever said anything) and the handprint was all just a way to fuck with his head. Not that Jack would do that. Dean thinks.

“I’m sorry,” says Dean, in lieu of saying anything that would actually mean something to her. Claire shrugs.

“He died for you, right,” she says. Dean flinches. “I kinda figured he would someday.”

“Not like I asked him to,” Dean says through gritted teeth. “The opposite actually.”

Claire’s hands are clenched into fists again. One of her fingernails cuts into her skin and Dean can see the blood start to drip down. He thinks of the bloody sigil Cas drew on the wall, the look on his face of sheer fucking bliss when he realized he could save Dean Winchester one last time. One last win he had in him, no matter what Dean thought about it. Because Cas had never once asked his opinion.

He thinks she’s gonna say something else. Something cutting. He kinda hopes she does, thinks maybe it will make him feel better. To know what awful names he should be calling himself, to know just how he fucked it up so badly this time, to have somewhere to start with what happened in that dungeon with Death at the door and the feeling of familiar relief when Cas said he knew how to get Dean out. That bone deep memory of Cas as something bigger than himself, someone he could rely on wholly without worry. And even if it hadn’t been true for a long while, it never stopped feeling true. And then the panic when Cas had said all he had to give was his life in exchange, and why not? Not like it was worth something. Not to Cas.

And, well, whose fault was that?

But Claire doesn’t say anything. She closes her eyes and mouths something to herself under her breath once and then opens them again. Her hands relax.

“So,” she says at last, breaking the silence. “Popcorn?”

Dean lets out a heavy breath.

“Popcorn.”

It tastes like plaster, but Dean paints on a smile and finishes watching the fucking movie like nothing is wrong. That much he knows how to do. If nothing else.

*****

The Bakers’ old house is burned down to the foundations. It’s been over forty years and no one ever built over it. It’s an ugly eyesore in an otherwise nice looking neighborhood, and there’s a yellowed for sale sign on its dead lawn that looks like it’s been around nearly as long as the house has been a burned out husk of itself.

Eileen holds up her phone and snaps a picture of it. A moment later, Sam taps her shoulder and signs to her, asking what she’s doing.

“Could be important,” she says. She took the picture on impulse, but she tends to trust those. Her gut is the thing that has kept her (mostly) alive, and after everything Sam has told her, she’s pretty sure the house is tied into the case somehow. Mary Winchester, rest her soul again, had haunted the Winchester family home for decades before she’d been released. Sure, their next stop is the cemetery and with any luck burning the bodies will do the trick and stop people from mysteriously disappearing. But if it doesn’t, well… she prefers to have something to look through for hints before the monsters know she’s on their trail.

She likes ghost hunts more than most. Figuring out where a ghost is going to appear plays to her strengths, the attention she pays to cold spots proving more reliable than other hunters who tend to rely on their hearing when trying to locate and dispel ghosts. The advantage of learning to adjust and rely on your other senses, is you get really good at it. So Eileen takes her advantages where she can get them.

She and Sam are suited up, with freshly printed badges (Agents Cash and Carter, Sam’s pick), but no one questions them as they cross the lawn and walk through what remains of the building’s foundations. The neighbors avoid looking at them, avoid looking at the house in general. Eileen is glad. She tends not to go the fake FBI route when she’s on her own, because people don’t buy it. Easier to get hired under the table as a worker of some kind, and lip read her way through a case from there. But Sam never doubts himself, and when he’s by her side suddenly the invasive personal questions of how exactly she got a job at the FBI stop, so she’s started to get used to the new wealth of information she gets from questioning people from a place of authority instead of spying for info from the sidelines.

Sam doesn’t speak or sign at her as they walk room by room through what remains of the first floor. The floorboards feel unsteady under her feet, and Eileen worries more than once that the ground will give way beneath her, but it doesn’t. She takes a few more pictures as they go through the house, surreptitiously taking one of Sam as he kneels on the ground to look at something, brow furrowed into a serious expression that is distractingly endearing. He lifts up a locket that just says “Lily” on it. It’s a little melted, but the name is still legible.

Eileen takes out a plastic bag, and Sam drops it inside. They don’t say anything to each other until they’re back on solid ground, and off the property. Eileen didn’t feel any cold spots during the search, but it was impossible not to feel the heavy sadness that hung in the air. One way or another, that house is haunted. She has a feeling it will stay that way even when the ghosts are gone.

They spend the hours between visiting the house and nightfall at a little town a few miles out, drinking coffee and collaborating over google docs on the tentatively named “Beat Chuck Part II: This Time It’s Personal” (Eileen’s pick for the name). It’s not real planning yet, but Eileen feels a little warmth in her chest when Sam throws back his head and laughs at her suggestion that they lock Chuck in an outhouse and read every comment from a reddit thread titled “Plot holes in the Supernatural book series (plus unpub manuscripts)” until he succumbs to severe brain damage.

As it gets dark, they pack up and head out the cemetery, locate the graves and start digging as night sets in, working in shifts. Soon enough they’ve uncovered side by side coffins and smash in the pine covers to reveal the rotted flesh and bones beneath. Eileen always says a short prayer when she does this, despite… well everything she now knows. It’s habit more than belief, her Catholic upbringing getting the better of her. But it feels right to say something. Not an apology, but an acknowledgement. It’s rough work, unearthing the dead. Even if they’re not exactly peaceful.

The two bodies go up in flame without so much as a protest, no ghosts appearing to defend their remains and burn with what remains of their bodies. Maybe they were somewhere else. Eileen feels a little uneasy at how simple the case is. She wonders if she’s just used to bigger problems to solve now. Something about the Winchesters seems to attract cases that are way above her paygrade, but she’s hoping for once they really did just pick up an easy hunt. Especially since they weren’t expected back for another two days.

Then again, considering the history attached to this hunt, best to stay on guard. In case it goes sideways.

But they get back to the hotel room and line the perimeter of the room with salt (and Eileen mentally takes note that they are going to be leaving an enormous tip for whoever has to clean that up) and then decide to wait it out until the next day to make sure the hunt is done. They fall asleep late in the night, unable to stop themselves from signing small exchanges between heated kisses. They don’t go much further than that, too tired to make things really interesting, but they don’t really need to either. Because they have tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and there is something intimate in staying up all night just to take each other in and Eileen doesn’t know how she spent so long without this closeness to someone else. Can’t fathom how she spent so much of her life alone.

She’s woken up early in the morning, the feeling of something wet and a little warm dripping down on her face. At first she thinks the upstairs neighbors must have fallen asleep with the bath running, and then she vaguely recalls that they’re on the top floor of the crappy hotel they found. At this point she’s lucid enough to recognize a familiarly metallic smell, and by the time her eyes open she knows something has gone very very wrong.

Above her is Sam, just waking up, pinned by his wrists, his ankles, his gut to the ceiling, his blood dripping down in little rivulets. And for a fraction of a second, they stare at each other in twin horror. But Sam doesn’t realize at first, Eileen isn’t the one in danger. His face twists up in a kind of cosmic horror that tells her he thinks she is the one about to die. Because that is how it happened the first time around and he can’t feel what is happening to him yet, can’t feel the pain in his gut that should clue him in exactly what is about to happen to him. But Eileen feels the sheets beneath her, she knows she’s safe. Sam opens his mouth as if to say something, but whatever words his lips were forming, she never gets to see. It happens so fast, maybe Sam never realizes he’s the one about to die at all.

Eileen just knows she never gets the chance to yell for him before he bursts into flame.

*****

Claire and Kaia get a lead on the hunt early the next morning, and decide to head out while the tip is still good. A hunter they know, Conrad Jones, a friend of Patience’s father sent out to keep an eye on her, has been systematically searching every warehouse in the city. He passed on that he’s found a warehouse with abandoned medical equipment inside, and even if the djinn’s moved sites to keep ahead of any hunters on its tail, he’s pretty sure they’re gonna come back for the hospital cot and IV, considering how hard it would be to get hands on a new one. Conrad’s set up a stake out, and Claire and Kaia are heading out to back him up and do some investigating of their own.

Dean watches as the two girls discuss the case, each carefully dipping three bronze blades in lamb’s blood and letting them dry as Alex wrinkles her nose in vague distaste. Patience points out that Alex does grosser things than that on a regular basis, and Alex retorts that lambs are babies. Not to mention she doesn’t exactly have a trauma free history where blood is concerned. Claire changes the subject and asks Patience if she has any visions to keep in mind, which she gets a negative on. Kaia ties one of the blades to a wooden staff, twirling it through her hands in a manner that is so like her counterpart, Dean blinks. But then she sets the staff down and Claire feeds her a piece of toast, and she seems like regular Kaia again.

After a busy half an hour, Jody is off at the station, Alex is showering before her shift at the hospital, Patience has taken Jody’s old Honda to attend one of her classes, and Kaia and Claire are about to head out for their hunt in Claire’s pick up truck. They all exist in a whirlwind around Dean, not ignoring him exactly, but wrapped up in their own lives. Claire spares the time to say goodbye and makes a semi-solemn promise to kick it in the ass before she and Kaia are out the door. Kaia isn’t quite as friendly, not that Dean can blame her for that. Sure, he’s the reason she’s not in the Bad Place anymore, but he’s also the reason she got stuck there in the first place. Not like that kind of thing cancels each other out.

It’s about mid-morning when Dean realizes that Jody left her phone on the kitchen counter. In her rush not to be late that morning, she must have only taken her work phone and forgotten her personal cell. Dean plugs it in for her, hopping across the kitchen to open the fridge and scrounge some leftovers from the night before. A few minutes later, the phone starts ringing. Figuring it might be one of the girls, Dean decides to check the caller ID so if it is he can answer and let them know to call Jody’s work phone instead if they need her. He slips Miracle a few pieces of roast beef before picking up the phone, smiling a little at how pissed Sam would be if he knew Dean was giving Miracle people food again.

“Our secret,” he says pointedly. Miracle just wags his tail. Dean ruffles the dumb little guy’s head, and picks up the phone. Claire is calling, so Dean answers without thinking and doesn’t even stop to say hello. “Call Jody’s work phone, kiddo-”

Dean doesn’t finish his sentence before he is interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream. He freezes, heart in his throat. It’s Claire. It’s Claire screaming so long and loud she must be hurt. Maybe even dying, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

“Claire,” he says. “Claire hang on.”

“Please you have to come get me,” she sobs into the phone. “We… I don’t know where they went. It’s just me, and it’s gonna come back for me. Please, please help me.”

“Claire-”

Except there’s a loud clatter and the phone goes dead. Dean moves the phone away from his ear and stares at it. First, he tries calling Jody’s work cell, but he gets her answering machine. He calls two more times in rapid succession, but still doesn’t get through. Next he calls the station and leaves a message for Jody to call him as soon as she gets it. The woman who takes his message seems a little alarmed, and lets him know Jody’s on a vandalism case a little ways out of town, and the cell reception isn’t so great there. She might not be back for a few hours.

It’s everything Dean can do not to yell. Every hunter he knows in this part of the country is too far away to get to Claire quickly enough to help her. He could find Patience or Alex in Jody’s contacts and he’s sure they would head out to help Claire, but he doesn’t know what he’d be sending them into. Patience won’t be checking her phone in class, and Alex won’t have her phone on her until her shift is done, anyway. He’s only seeing one option here, and it’s pretty fucking grim. Still, he sends a message to everyone’s phone, Claire and Kaia included, explaining exactly what he heard over the call, and hoping someone gets on it ASAP.

Until then, Dean asks one of Jody’s neighbors if he can borrow their truck to do a favor for Jody. They look a little skeptical that Jody would ask Dean to do anything, considering the fact Dean has a cast covering his left leg from toe to upper thigh, but the respect for Jody seems to run deep because they end up letting him. Dean is up and on the road towards the last GPS location pinged off Claire’s phone in no time. By which he means he’s doing 90 down the two lane highway into the city and swerving around anyone who gets in his way. He’s damn lucky the local police seem to be busy with other things after all, because he doesn’t get pulled over. He reaches the electronics warehouse Claire’s cellphone called from, and parks. He decides to only take one crutch, using his free hand to hold his own bronze knife at the ready.

Dean approaches the warehouse as quickly and quietly as he can with one good leg, keeping an eye out for Claire or the djinn. It starts to occur to him at this point how unlikely it is that Claire is still alive. He pushes the thought from his head, heart already pounding too hard to consider that possibility.

He limps his way through hallway after hallway, looking for some evidence of a struggle. About ten minutes later he stumbles across the medical equipment Conrad had been talking about. Next to it is a dead djinn, stabbed through the gut. Someone had taken the time to lie the body on its back, cross the dead djinn’s arms across her body. She looks arranged with care, and all of Dean’s instincts seem to kick in at once as he realizes just what is wrong with this picture.

He turns just in time to see an average looking man swing something heavy at his head. He goes down in about two seconds flat, his crutch and his knife clattering away from him as he hits the ground. Dizzy, Dean tries to push himself up, only to collapse back onto the ground. He unholsters his gun, ready to fight whatever the hell this thing is to the bitter fucking end, but he’s barely lifted his hand before it’s kicked out of his grasp, his wrist bending in a position that can’t be natural, and refusing to bend back. Dean wonders distantly if that’s broken too now. It doesn’t hurt yet.

Suddenly there are strong arms under his shoulders dragging him deeper into the warehouse, away from the dead djinn. Dean weakly tries to fight back, but he’s dizzy and he’s having trouble keeping things straight. He figures he must have the mother of all concussions (probably not helped with hitting his head on Jody’s first floor bathtub the night before), and it’s all he can do to keep consciousness.

Finally he’s dragged into a small room covered in telephone wires and computer screens, almost every inch of space taken up by junky tech pieced together with the kind of tenacity and ingenuity that would be impressive if the guy who had done it hadn’t just knocked Dean very hard over the head. Dean has the presence of mind to notice that Claire is tied up and gagged to one of the support beams in the rooms, but appears to still be breathing. Conrad and Kaia are nowhere in sight, but Dean figures they’re probably regrouping nearby. Hopefully, at least. Because as stupid as it was for Dean to drive out and try to save Claire alone, he hadn’t figured he would fuck up this badly, this quickly. At least, he thought he’d be able to stall for time.

“So,” says the man. “You must be the famous Dean Winchester. The stories I’ve heard about you, they used to keep me and Ella up at night.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean slurs, his speech not coming out quite right. “I have that effect on people. Your girl call out my name too when you-?”

The man tosses Dean against the wall, cracking a few of Dean’s ribs. Or at least Dean thinks that’s why every breath sends a pang of agony running through his system. Still, he manages to summon a laugh.

“That all you got?”

“Not even close,” says the thing. He looks Dean Winchester up and down in obvious distaste, as if cataloging him. Reaching deeper for something he can use. “That djinn your little hunter friend killed? She was the love of my life. The only thing that gave it meaning.”

“What, you want me to sit shiva?”

“You never shut up, do you?” he says, rolling his eyes and open-hand smacking Dean across the face. Dean feels one of his molars come loose, and spits it out onto the floor. “As I was saying. I decided I’d keep little Claire here alive. Lure out everyone she ever loved and make her watch me eat them. I don’t even care if someone kills me for it, as long as she knows an ounce of the suffering she put on me. But you… you’re just a bonus. Not even sure she needs to be awake for this part. Killing Dean Winchester is its own reward.”

“Wish I could tell you that you were my first,” Dean says. He’s going to die. The inevitability of it rushes in all at once. He can barely move with all the injuries he sustained. His right hand is useless, his left leg was already useless, he’s so dizzy he can barely see straight, and the thing in front of him seems hell bent on ending him. He’s gonna die, and he couldn’t even save Claire while he’s at it. Can’t even figure out what exactly this thing is. Fucking useless.

“Oh don’t worry,” says the monster, voice gone snide and a little high pitched, as if the thing is barely holding back his laughter. “I’ll make this one memorable. You’ll see.”

Then he hits Dean over the head again, and this time, everything goes dark.

*****

A lot of things occur to Eileen in a short amount of time. The first is, if she doesn’t push down the horror and think very, very fast, she too is going to burn to death. The second is that, as far as she can tell, there were no demon signs while they were in town. Usually, if something unusual is going on, it is one thing. Ergo, what is currently happening is related to the hunt she and Sam have been working on.

Eileen rolls off the bed and pulls out her phone, covering her face with a discarded t-shirt she left on the motel floor to try to keep out the worst of the smoke. She scrolls through her photo app as fast as she can, finding nothing in picture after picture. It’s not until she gets to the last one, the one of Sam stooping down to pick up the locket that she sees the vague outlines of a man and a woman glaring down at him. They look almost real, but there is something off about the coloring in the photo that makes it look like the sun isn’t hitting them. Eileen shoves her phone in her pocket and rolls under the bed, reaching for her duffle and pulling it under with her.

She can feel the heat of the fire as pieces of the ceiling start to fall onto the floor. She sees out of the corner of her eye as the curtains catch. She’s already almost out of time. She yanks the locket out of the plastic evidence bag they’d brought to the burned down house and sees the two ghosts materialize in the room, their feet standing out ghostly pale against the flames licking down the plaster walls. Eileen feels the vibrations of a resounding boom as part of the ceiling collapses, partly over the bed. The fire is burning so hot, Eileen flinches away from it. She only just has the presence of mind to throw the locket into the thick of the fire before rolling out from under the bed, and trying to see through the smoky haze to find the door.

The ghosts materialize in front of her, and Eileen realizes the locket must not have caught yet. She slashes at the both of them with an iron knife, dissipating them briefly. But she’s out of time, she can feel the room shifting around her, she knows the shitty infrastructure of the building was not meant to withstand how weak the fire has left it. She’s gonna die, she’s gonna die again and the last thing she ever saw is going to be…

But then the ghosts burn. They appear again and reach for her, screaming as they burn. And the fire goes out.

Eileen scrambles for the door, hauling it open just in time to get out of the room before the rest of the ceiling collapses in. Breathing hard, it takes a moment to realize she’s alive. She made it out by the skin of her teeth, and the ghosts are gone, and nothing is coming for her.

And then the rest of it all comes back to her too.

“Sam?” she calls out. She won’t hear an answer if there is one, but she doesn’t know what else to do. So she sits on the ground and stares at the ruined hotel room.

Then she grits her teeth and pushes herself to her feet. She starts to dig him out, ignoring the pain of charred debris searing her palms, making her skin redden and bubble. She is going to find Sam.

Or what’s left of him anyway.

*****

Cas is expanding Heaven when Billie comes to him. He has taken to heart Ash’s newest assertion that there isn’t enough space in Heaven to keep everyone happy and he is attempting to devise a plan that would place some people on slightly different levels of existence. This way, people can interact with the loved ones they wish to and choose not to perceive anyone they don’t. It’s a tricky bit of architecture, and Cas isn’t sure he has the skill to build it unaided. Still, here he is testing it out on a small corner of Heaven where he thinks no one will notice him. If it succeeds, he’ll pass the plan on to Ash and Jack and see if it solves some of the problems that have been coming up since the walls have come down. If he fails, all the better to keep it to himself for now.

“Who would have thought,” she says to him. He stiffens, turning from his work to face her. “All that time you spent knocking things down. But this is what you really wanted. The chance to build something. Deep down you still wanna be God. Wonder what your son would say about that?”

“You’re one to talk,” Cas says, responding to the bulk of Billie’s assertion by rolling his eyes in a show of contempt. He may owe her something for his transgressions against her, but it is not an explanation of himself. That she will be left to wonder at.

“See, that’s where you and your little friends were wrong about me, Castiel,” she says. “I never wanted to be God. I wanted to be Death. I wanted the finality my profession entailed to be restored. And much as we loathe each other, even now you know Death is not the real enemy.”

Cas looks away from her. He does not venture a guess as to who the real enemy might be. They both know.

“What do you want from me?”

“Not a question you’d like me to answer,” says Billie. “Better one, why am I here?”

Cas sighs, and he can tell Billie takes a certain amount of satisfaction in his frustration. He closes his eyes, despite the physical act doing nothing to dull his perception. He might be wearing the image of a human body, might have clung to it for a while now because it comforts him to wear it, but he has more eyes that humans have strands of hair on their heads, and it is impossible not to be aware of Death’s presence in any case. Even as Cas knows he is protected from any threat she could pose to him, he cannot ignore the overwhelming existence of that threat. But closing the eyes of his human body, feeling the moment of reset, is enough to give him patience to continue on.

“Why are you here?”

“I had something I thought you might want to see,” says Billie. “Of course if you’d prefer I go…”

Cas has a feeling he knows exactly what Billie means to show him. She’s already come to him once before, when Dean had broken his leg on a ghost hunt and come close to dying (again) before Sam had managed to get him medical attention in time. She had come then only to deliver the news after it had happened, and spoke as if it hadn’t occurred to her that it might bother him. As if she were merely commenting on the weather or asking after his health, or any number of inconsequential things they might think to say to each other if they were not beings beyond the need for such pleasantries.

“What is this?” he asks, wishing he could bring himself to turn her away. Wishing that the both of them didn’t already know exactly what is about to happen. “Temptation?”

“Read another book,” says Billie with a snort. “I’m giving you a choice. Or would you prefer it was the way it was before? You wanna be God, but you want someone else giving the orders so you don’t have to deal with the consequences. No wonder you think this is paradise.”

It is with a sharp sense of surprise that Castiel feels burning at the back of his throat. His vessel’s throat. His body’s throat. As if there is too much shame in the rest of him to be contained. The accusation, it isn’t quite right. But it hits close enough to home that Cas understands he does want a version of this. For the blood to be washed clean from his hands, to be forgiven, to be whole. All his very long life, and he has always been cracked. But his son, his son fixed him. He does not want to be broken again.

But that is nothing compared to the part of him that has lain dormant under Jack’s careful reconstruction. Because there still is a wanting so great it could swallow the rest of him up, and has for twelve years and counting. And there is something joyful in letting it consume him again, as frightened as that makes him. Because it means he has another choice to make, and he thought he had left choice behind, at long last.

“Show me,” he says, and she smiles at him. Bitter, resigned, relieved. He cannot quite read her expression but he understands the intent well enough. This is what she expected. This is what she is counting on.

Somehow, Castiel cannot bring himself to care.

*****

Dean wakes up feeling like he’s too nauseous to actually hack anything up. The last few hours are fuzzy, but he vaguely remembers he’s supposed to be doing something. Something important. He tries to open his eyes, but there’s something heavy and rough draped over them, keeping him in the dark. When he tries to move, he realizes his hands are tied behind him around some kind of support beam. He struggles to claw his way back to proper functioning, but his thoughts are sluggish and incoherent, and every muscle in his body aches, and he can’t quite put together what’s going on-

“Hello, Dean.”

It’s like someone took a brick to his face. He stops moving, stops struggling, stops thinking. It’s Cas. The inflection, the fond fucking upturn of his voice, every bit of it is as familiar as the back of Dean’s hand, and for a moment he’s so happy nothing else really matters. He hoped maybe he was right but he didn’t know, and oh fuck he has no idea what he’s going to say and…

And why isn’t Cas untying him?

It’s one thought in a litany of others, and Dean doesn’t have the presence of mind to organize any of them. Still, a sense of wrongness starts in at the back of Dean’s head. Because… because Cas can’t be alive. Because if he was he would have been there. He would have said something. He would have put Dean out of his fucking misery and said something.

“Cas?” he asks. He feels a hand against his cheek, turning his face up. “Cas, man, we- We gotta get out of here, I think there’s-”

“You’re alright,” says Cas, urgent but soothing, and for a moment Dean thinks this must be true. Cas has never been a good liar, and he sounds so sincere Dean almost forgets his doubts. Almost lets his guard down and just… just lets Cas pull him out of another bad situation, because that’s what Cas does. “It’s going to be over soon.”

Cas let’s go of his face, and Dean let’s his words sink in. There’s something off about them, and Dean feels himself flinch away when Cas’ hand comes down to press right over his heart where the new burn mark is. The only proof, the only evidence he has that Cas is alive besides the voice he’s hearing now. Except… except he can’t trust even that. He knows that.

But he wants so badly to believe.

“I can’t see,” Dean says, struggling again. He lets out a hiss of pain as pulls at his obviously broken wrist. He wonders if he’s up to pulling a Houdini with his left hand and grimly thinks the answer is no. Not with how tight whatever fucker got him tied these knots. “Gonna give a fella a hand?”

“No,” says Cas. “You don’t think I’m really here to save you, do you?”

Cas’ hand stays resting over Dean’s heart. Must feel the way it picks up then, slamming against Dean’s cracked rib cage like a jackhammer. And once again that sickening sensation that something is wrong, Dean is missing something, he’d figure it out if he could just put one thought in front of the other without losing the fucking plot.

“Cas-”

“I suppose it’s my fault for thinking you would remember I’m dead,” says Cas, voice gone a little cold. “Or perhaps that you would remember why I’m dead. All so you could live. And look at you now. Just another man dying some sad little death born from his own stupidity.”

Cas’ hand presses down a little, and Dean grits his teeth against the pain of broken bone grating against bone. The pain centers him, in a way. It’s something he’s used to, something to hold onto. Something that isn’t Cas’ voice drilling into his head what a goddamn disappointment he is.

“I thought the world of you, and this is what you do with my sacrifice?” Cas asks, voice low and angry and jarring. Because Cas doesn’t sound like that anymore. He hasn’t in a long time. Every argument he had with Dean in recent years is tinged with disappointment, but never with the rage Cas used to wear on his sleeve when the wounds Dean left in him were fresh. When Cas was still figuring out how to feel and what it all meant. “And somehow you still wonder why I never told you? What would have been the point? I’m not enough to live for. No one is. You changed me, but I couldn’t change you. And the worst part is you know you’re not enough. Not for me, not for your little brother, not for Claire or Jack or anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to know you. You don’t even have the courage to be enough for yourself.”

And Dean, well. It hurts like hell to hear those words, but Dean has a working theory now. Cas wouldn’t say this to him. Not ever. Sure, Cas’ll call him stupid or a broken shell of a man or worse, but he says it in an offhand way that is less of an insult and more an expression of heartfelt hurt. And these… these aren’t the ways Cas would try to hurt him, if the thought of hurting Dean on purpose ever crossed his mind, which Dean knows in his bones it hasn’t. These are the things that haunt Dean as he reaches the bottom of bottle after bottle, the things he thinks to himself as he stays up into the night, the words that whisper at the back of his head as he stares at cheese in the dairy section of the god damn grocery store.

Assuming Dean isn’t hallucinating, and he’s pretty sure he’s not… someone stole his best friend’s voice to fuck with him. Again. And if Dean ever gets his hands on this thing, it isn’t gonna be pretty. But for now, he plays along and he tries to remember exactly why he’s here. It’s something to do with Claire, something to do with a djinn, but…

“Well, Cas, this is some kind of reunion,” Dean mutters, gritting out the words through pained inhales as the steady pressure on his chest increases bit by bit. “But if you’d like to get to the point sometime soon, I’m sure viewers at home would really appreciate it.”

Dean hears a crack as another rib breaks, followed by his own voice crying out in pain. He feels distant from it all. Like it’s some other poor sap who’s about to be killed by a vengeful echo of his best friend.

“I could crush the life out of you and you’d just let me, wouldn’t you?” asks Cas. Dean does his best to glare, considering the whole blindfold thing.

“Untie me and find out.”

“Or you could come to me,” says Cas, voice soft and considering now. “Back to the Empty for eternity. I know how tired you are, Dean. Don’t you want to rest? Don’t you want to know peace?”

And that’s when it all fell into place. Dean almost laughed as the monster continued his fucking monologue.

“I could walk you to the ledge, and all you’d have to do is jump-”

“Crocotta,” says Dean. And that shuts the thing up. At fucking last. “Never heard of a crocotta shacking up with a djinn, but I guess you can double dip on the happy meals, huh? Djinn sucks the life out, you get the soul, two for one combo. All the benefits of a hunting partner and half the bodies to deal with.”

There’s a pause. It’s still Cas’ voice, but the crocotta doesn’t even try to get it right this time.

“How’d you figure it out?”

“Come to me. Those three words are your kind’s calling card,” says Dean, and the crocotta stops pressing down on his chest. Dean sucks in a deep, aching breath, feeling his lungs expand to their full capacity again. He keeps talking, because even if he’s gonna die, maybe someone else will hear him. Claire could still get out of this, if she knows how. Dean doesn’t know if she’s conscious or not, but on the off chance he’s gonna give her everything she needs to make it. “Remember how to kill you suckers too. Sever the spine, and it’s goodbye Mel Blanc. Not sure where you got that voice, since last I heard you fuckers had to hear it first-”

“Had enough time in your head while you were napping to figure out how to find it,” says the crocotta. “Believe it or not there are more than a few Youtube videos of your boyfriend playing at being God. Googled ‘God chokes homophobic pastor’ and got someone’s phone recording of the whole thing the first page of results. Picked up the voice pretty quick from there.”

“What do you want? A cookie?”

“In a manner of speaking,” says the crocotta, sounding so heartbreakingly like Cas in that single sentence Dean wants to strangle him. “Not sure if I want to eat you, though. Your soul’s more than a little singed. Could give me indigestion.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Why, did you want to listen in?” says the crocotta, which pretty much short circuits whatever other insults Dean was about to start hurling. Because hell no, he doesn’t want that, but the thought of it is enough to make his head fritz out. “I don’t usually do requests, but I could make an exception. You being the Dean Winchester and all. I’d sound just like him, if you wanted one last bittersweet memory for the road.”

And the fucker had the nerve to pat Dean’s cheek as he said it. Dean spit at him, hoping the crocotta was close enough for a direct hit. But the crocotta just laughed, then hauled back and broke Dean’s nose for good measure. The hot rush of blood flooding down Dean’s face was a distraction from the horrifying shit the guy had just suggested, so there was that at least.

“Or I could beat you to a pulp, if you’d prefer,” the crocotta said. “Then again, the way your brain is wired I have a feeling you’d be a little bit into it.”

“Jesus Christ, just kill me already,” says Dean, voice dripping with hatred. It’s not a second later that he has a knife at his throat and he’s wishing he didn’t have such a big fucking mouth.

“Well, if you insist.”

*****

Cas watches as the scene freezes, suspended in Billie’s hands. He can feel her watching him, knows she has seen the way his hands have clenched into his fists. She can probably hear his grace thrumming, anxious as a hummingbird. It is one thing to know that Dean is going to die, again, and he is once more put into the position of choosing between what he should do and what he wants to do. (He should let Dean die. It is the unfortunate result of Dean’s own actions, and much as Castiel hates it there is no argument he could spin that would justify resurrecting Dean twice that would go unpunished.) But to know, not only that Dean is at death’s door once again, but that the monster responsible would use his voice, that the last thing Dean would ever hear would be-

“What are you offering me?” says Cas.

“Good to see you’ve caught on,” she says. “As it happens, I’m offering you a reprieve.”

“What?”

“A chance to talk to him before his throat gets slit. A chance to make your peace with all of this and for everything to stay exactly the same. A chance to obey,” she says. Castiel can feel himself swallow, uncertain. “I think we both know I have a feeling what you’re gonna choose, Castiel. But here’s your chance to prove me wrong. That letting you have any say over the natural order isn’t an epic mistake to be rectified at God’s earliest convenience.”

“It’s not enough to see me go from the frying pan to the fire,” Cas summarizes. “You need me to jump.”

“Call it a leap of faith, if you’d like.”

“It isn’t faith,” says Cas, looking back to the image Billie holds in her hands again. Back to Dean, bloody and scared and defiant even in his last moments. And it is a choice, but it’s a choice Cas made a long time ago. So he does not even bother to look at Billie when he asks his final question. “What’s the price?”

“That’s not for me to decide, is it?” she says. “Again, I can’t interfere in the Winchesters’ matters. And you are still firmly included.”

“What do you call this?”

“If Jack is asking? A temporal coincidence. You can consider it a favor,” she says. “One I expect to be returned. When the time comes.”

And now Cas does look at her.

“You would trust me to do that? After… well.”

“No. But I trust you to act in his best interests,” Billie says, nodding towards the image of Dean she has conjured. “See, unlike some people, I learn from my mistakes.”

So there it is laid out before him. The trap he is meant to step into. Death has taken no pains to hide it, and Cas can see with utter clarity exactly how he is being asked to damn himself. It is, if nothing else, refreshingly honest. There isn’t even the pretense of deceit, only the game already won as far as Billie is concerned. And Cas will let her win, because the alternative is unthinkable. Because as long as he is alive, he will never let Dean Winchester die.

Not if he can do something to help it.

*****

Dean is pretty sure he’s dead again, when he feels his aches and pains start to fade away and his mind start to clear. They aren’t quite gone, though, which confuses him. It’s more like turning the volume on the radio down to a whisper than anything else. He knows the pain is still there, but he feels distant from it.

He opens his eyes then and finds himself standing in the middle of the room he’d been tied up in. He spots Claire first, slumped down but with her muscles suspiciously tense. She doesn’t move, not even to breathe. In a panic, Dean turns to see himself, still bound, and the crocotta holding a knife against his neck. The whole scene is frozen, like something out of a snow globe. That calms him down, reassuring him Claire isn’t gone, just stuck in time like the rest of this sorry scene. Maybe Dean is dead, and this is where he meets his latest reaper. Like they think he’ll fight them, still, after everything. Like he won’t go peacefully if it means not setting off the next series of un-fucking-fortunate events meant to put him in the god damn ground.

“You’re not dead yet.”

And there’s that voice again. Dean turns to see Cas standing in the room with him, or the perfect facsimile at least. He looks hesitant, unsure how he is going to be received. Too bad for him Dean Winchester’s memory is working pretty good again, and he happens to know for a fact that reapers can look like whatever they like. If they think it’ll calm down the person they’re speaking to.

“Wow. What is this the gimmick of the week?” says Dean. “You’re not Cas. Cas is dead. Not like I’ve never seen a fucking reaper before.”

“Dean-”

“Everyone thinks they’re fucking hilarious, huh? Heard an angel had a thing for Dean Winchester and just couldn’t resist putting on the get up to fuck with me one last time,” says Dean. The reaper flinches, and Dean can’t help but laugh. “I look like I’m resisting? Take me, I don’t even care where I go. Hell, make up some new place just for me. I’m tired, I-”

“Dean. You aren’t going to die,” Cas interrupts, sounding exasperated. Dean glares at him, and Cas glares back defiantly. Then he growls and his eyes slide past Dean to take in the room, clearly content with continuing the ruse that he’s here to save Dean. That this isn’t one last fuck you from the universe, a cherry on top of a particularly shitty life.

Dean clocks the moment Cas’ eyes fall on Claire. The way he freezes, eyes suddenly cold with rage, makes something in Dean’s head light up even before he puts it together. Because a reaper wouldn’t think to care. Not even a dick reaper trying to pull one over on Dean for the Hell of it would think to care about Cas’ vessel’s daughter. They wouldn’t know why she would matter to him. “Claire, is she-?”

“Alive,” says Dean. And because he’s put it together, because he can’t help but state the obvious, he swallows hard and adds: “It’s you. It’s really you.”

“It’s… me,” Cas confirms, dragging his attention away from Claire to meet Dean’s eyes for a brief moment before looking away again. Not towards Claire this time, who is safe as long as time is frozen. Just… away. It stings, even as Dean tells himself it shouldn’t.

“So,” says Dean. “Are we gonna talk about it?”

“Preferably not,” says Cas. He walks over to where the crocotta is standing and slips the knife out of his frozen fingers. The blade nicks frozen Dean’s throat a little as he does so, not deep enough to be a problem, but enough to make Dean flinch, his hand flying to his own incorporeal throat. Cas stands and throws the blade across the room, out of reach and out of sight. His back is turned to Dean. “Sorry.”

“About the cut or…?” Dean asks. Cas doesn’t answer him. Figures. “So what you’re here to get me out of trouble? Well. That’s swell. Am I gonna remember it this time?”

A sharp inhale, but Cas doesn’t turn to look at him.

“Yeah, I thought that might’ve been you,” says Dean. “Couldn’t really… Couldn’t really wrap my head around it, ‘cause I figured if you were back you would have- You wouldn’t have just- Jesus Christ, Cas.”

Cas sighs, squares his shoulders, and turns to face Dean. His expression is carefully neutral, empty, as if he’d been carved of marble. But the air around him seems to buzz, as if whatever’s going on in his head is just too big to be contained properly. And good. At least he feels something about all of this.

“You probably won’t remember this part,” says Cas, voice even. “But it seems I’ll have to make an appearance in a more physical form if I want you to survive. Which, unfortunately, I do, more than anything else in the world apparently. So you’ll remember that.”

Dean forgot how sarcastic Cas could be. The familiarity of it is a punch to his gut and he’s never liked Cas more than he does right now. Never hated him more either.

“God, you’re a dick,” says Dean, hearing a short burst of laughter stutter through him. “What, so why’d I have to be here for this whole part? Didn’t know you needed an audience when you went invisible girl.”

“This isn’t me, stopping time. It’s Death. Jack reinstated Billie, and I wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t told me that you were about to… well. Die. I’m not supposed to save you. I’m not even supposed to be near you anymore after what happened last time. Billie is testing me, giving me the chance to make things right with you, offer you a peaceful passing,” says Cas. Dean stares at him. “Which I don’t intend to.”

“What if I wanted to take you up on that?”

“No.”

“Wow, shocker. You not caring about what I think about all this.”

“You-” Cas says, almost raising his voice. Almost. But then his steely self control is in place again, and part of Dean starts to wonder at that. Like the off switch for Cas’ emotions had suddenly come back in a big way and he wondered if Jack had anything to do with it. “When it comes to preserving your life, no. I don’t care what you think. Because you think so poorly of yourself, it borders on parody.”

“Yeah, but you love me anyway, right?” says Dean, and despite himself he knows how it sounds. It sounds mean. It sounds like he doesn’t give a damn. And maybe that’s what Cas needs to push him through the other side of whatever this is, but Dean hates himself a little for going this route. Not like he knows another one, though. “That’s what you said last time we-”

“Don’t,” says Cas. His voice betrays more emotion than he probably meant to, which is what Dean is looking for. “You will not make me feel ashamed. Not of what I did and not of what I said.”

“How about the fact you were too much of a fucking coward to say it when it mattered? How about that, Cas?”

Dean is yelling now, but it’s not like anyone can hear them. Well, maybe Billie, but fuck her. Cas is gonna listen to him for once, and if it has to be a fight so fucking be it.

“It never mattered!” Cas yells back. “You didn’t feel the same way, I wasn’t going to put that burden on you-”

“How would you know, you didn’t ask!”

“I would know,” says Cas. “It’s not as if- This body, it’s not the problem. And I know because Crowley, of all people, made sure to tell me that in excruciating detail. On more than one occasion, for the record.”

“That’s not fair-”

“Why because you were a demon? Why would that make a difference?” asks Cas. Dean tries to start in at another angle, but apparently Cas isn’t done yet. “So it’s not the body. It’s not what I am, I know that much. So when I thought, when I hoped, that things could be different, I asked myself what would keep you from going after something you wanted? And I couldn’t find an answer. So if you think you feel something now, I can only conclude it’s because you are forcing yourself to. Because you try to mold yourself into whatever role keeps the people you love close, no matter how ill it fits. But you were already enough. I’m not asking for anything from you. That’s why I didn’t come back. Because everything would have changed, one way or another, and… I couldn’t bear the thought.”

And there it all is.

It takes Dean a moment to realize what he’s been doing. That the whole point of this fight, consciously or not, is to carve away at Cas, poking and prodding where the nerves are raw, altering his tone to cause the most rage, the most pain. Because it’s the only way Dean knows how to get to the truth. Because Cas dragged him out of Hell, but Dean never set his knife down and twelve years later he still doesn’t know how to use anything else.

But he can try. Awful as it is, Cas just gave him all the tools he needs to see this through. To set everything in motion. Still, it’s not every day you ask an angel to fall again. And both of you older and wiser and worse for wear than the first time around. But that doesn’t mean Dean isn’t gonna ask.

“Okay, Cas,” says Dean, and keeps his voice soft. Soft enough that if Cas were anyone else he might have to strain to hear. As it is, Cas just looks startled. And alarmed as Dean takes a step forward, a step towards him. “But you owe it to me to say my piece. You know that.”

“I owe it to you?” Cas says, sounding like he’s gonna argue the point.

“Yeah, when you peace out with a curveball like that and then walk back into my life whenever my ass is on the line, I get to say what I think about the whole arrangement. And it seems to me like you’re scared of what that’s gonna be, but that’s not my problem. You don’t get to put this cat back in the bag. You told me you love me, you stupid asshole,” says Dean. And as he talks he keeps walking forward, and he counts it as a victory when Cas takes a step back from him and doesn’t stop there. “And then you died. What the hell did you think that was gonna do to me?”

“I was more concerned with getting you out of that room alive-”

“What part of let me say my piece didn’t you understand the first time? You got your big, damn speech, now let me fucking talk,” says Dean. He stops walking then, and Cas stops retreating a moment after, stuttering to an almost robotic stand still. They’re at the far side of the room, away from the frozen confrontation with the crocotta. It’s almost private, and for whatever reason time is still stuck and it’s not like Billie is showing up to clarify matters, so Dean is gonna lay it out on the line. For whatever that’s worth.

There’s a moment where Dean collects his thoughts, and Cas just looks at him. And yeah, Dean can tell just how scared he is and it doesn’t make sense because… Because what does he even think Dean is going to say? Dean can’t even fathom a worst case scenario to put that look of abject misery on to his best friend’s face. Cas doesn’t even really want him, that much he made clear when he got brought back from the fucking grave and didn’t stop by to say hello. And well that’s as good a place to start as any.

“I, um, I had to just pick myself up off the floor. Sam and Jack, they wanted to know what happened to you and I couldn’t- uh. I got it through to Sam eventually. What happened. And then there was the whole thing with Chuck, right, and you weren’t there. And I couldn’t make it make sense in my head, because you’ve always been there for the really big stuff, y’know?” says Dean. The longer he talks, the more and more confused Cas looks and Jesus it’s getting hard to get it all out. “It didn’t even really feel like we’d won, now that I think about it. We just drove around in circles for a while, after we left Chuck behind and Jack did his thing. Stopped in town, got something to eat. Then Sam and I, we went back to the bunker and I went to sleep that night, and I kinda didn’t think I’d even wake up. Y’know with Jack in charge and everything. I’m not… I’m not even really supposed to be alive. I’ve been on borrowed time longer than I’ve known you. But you died for me and I wanted Sam to feel like he was finally safe for once in his fucking life, so I had to keep pretending to be happy. And I almost convinced myself, for a second there. Really, really convinced myself.”

It’s Cas who takes a step forward this time. It almost seems unconscious, as if he’s forgotten whatever resolution he had to keep his distance.

“Dean,” he says, and he sounds so goddamn sorry for him. Dean wants to laugh.

“You don’t have to- I know what I am, okay? Whatever you see in me, maybe I’m that, but I’m a lot of shitty things too. I don’t always have the words, so I try to be there in other ways. And I- I didn’t even know you could feel like that. Not like it was so obvious, from where I’m standing. You never took an interest in anybody, not really. What I’m trying to say is, it’s not like I spent all those years just- I’m trying to tell you that I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t want you to know.”

“I’m still sorry. Because that had to have been hard. And I- you have to know that I care about you, Cas. But when you threw your life away for me over and over again, that didn’t feel like love. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if you even liked me or you just stuck around because you felt guilty. But I never had a best friend before, so I tried not to think about it. I just knew it was better when you were there, and I thought maybe someday you’d pick up on that and you never did. The happiest you ever were, Cas, was when you got to leave me one last time. Think about how that sits in my head, no matter what you said before that.”

“I don’t understand,” Cas says. And Dean is making him miserable again. Doesn’t that just prove the point that Cas is too thick to get through his skull. “That’s not what happened-”

“The point is you don’t actually want to be with me. I’m not enough. Not as a friend, not as whatever you thought you wanted with me. And deep down you know that, otherwise you would have come back. So I’m sorry for all the times before that- that I made you stick around. Because you coulda had the real thing if I’d let you go a long time ago.”

“No, stop it,” says Cas. “As if I would trade a second-”

“Which is why,” Dean says, interrupting again and hoping that Cas will just let him finish. “I’m even more sorry now. Because I think you have a choice to make, and you’re not gonna like either of the options. You said you’re not supposed to be here, you’re not supposed to save me, but this is the third time my number’s been up in as many cases, so I can’t shake the feeling someone has it out for me. And if it’s who I think it is, they’re sure as shit not gonna let you back down here for attempt number four. But even if I can’t be what you want Cas, I will pick you if you pick me.”

Just like Dean thought, this is the part where Cas gets it. And, unfortunately, just like Dean thought, this is the part where he breaks. Because Dean hasn’t asked yet, not really, but Cas has to know that he will, if Cas lets him. Still, there’s nothing in the world to prepare him for what comes out of Cas’ mouth next.

“Tell me what to do,” he says. Dean stares at him. It’s like all the energy, all the fight has just drained out of Cas. He looks the way Dean feels most days, like living is an exercise in going through the motions. “Everything feels wrong. Everything has felt wrong since I left the Empty. The only time I felt like me again was making certain you got to live even when you shouldn’t have. You said I don’t listen to what you have to say. Maybe that’s true. So I’m sorry, too. Just… tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Cas has never sounded so small before. Dean is lost for words and he wonders if the thing he was doing worked a little too well. It would make sense, not like either of them are playing with a full deck of cards, and this moment out of time could shatter at any second, and there’s more than enough anger and hurt to go between them. But there’s more than that, too.

“Cas, if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that no one in the universe can tell you what the fuck to do,” says Dean. It’s a relief to see the hint of a smile there in his best friend’s face. To know, even after everything, there is that warmth between them still there. Because all those little moments when the world wasn’t ending, when they weren’t fighting, when they weren’t drowning in their own mistakes, those add up too. They matter. In the web of what makes up their lives, those are the connecting lines that held together when Chuck’s plot tried to cut Cas out. Because the small things are just easy with Cas, always have been. Even when everything else wasn’t. Even if maybe the big things never will be. “But can I ask?”

“Of course,” Cas says, unthinking. He doesn’t realize it’s the permission Dean is looking for. It’s absolution.

“Stay with me this time?” asks Dean. Cas’ expression is unreadable. “I can’t tell you it’s the right thing to do, and I can’t promise you that I’ll be a better friend this time around. But just stay anyway. Because I’m asking. Because I want you here. If I get out of this mess, don’t go back. Even if- Fuck it, Cas, just… stay.”

It’s a long time before Cas says anything to that. Dean has some idea what must be going through his head. Cas isn’t even supposed to be here. If he doesn’t go back, his absence will be noted. Is this a betrayal? It’s one thing to leave a god you don’t know behind, one who it becomes increasingly clear gets a sick kind of kick out of the Saw-style series of fucked up choices he’s made your life into. Jack’s another story, because there is nothing and no one Cas will ever love more than his kid. Dean knows that in his bones, and he doesn’t hold it against Cas for a second.

But he still has to ask. And he knows what Cas will say before he even says it. There is something in the flex of his jaw, something in the look in his eye. Something in the way Cas’ hand flinches, for just a second. As if he means to reach out and holds himself back at the last second.

“I’ll stay,” he says quietly. “If I can.”

“Okay,” says Dean, relief coursing through every vein in his body. Cas is as good as his word, and more loyal than anyone deserves. Dean knows it’s not a promise Cas is gonna break. All that’s really left is the other thing. “Good. You, uh, you said I wouldn’t remember this part, right?”

“I’ll convey the gist-” Cas starts to say, not realizing just how close he’s wandered during their conversation. Not registering, at first, as Dean grabs a handful of his tie and pulls Cas forward with a sharp yank, taking a hard turn and a few steps back until his back is against a wall and Cas has a hand braced on either side of Dean’s head to stop himself from crashing into Dean from the momentum. There’s a wide-eyed look of fear on Cas’ face, and Dean almost wants to laugh at him. “What are you doing?”

“You’re not the only one who gets to be a coward, Cas,” says Dean. There’s no mistaking the compromising position he’s put them in, and there’s no world in which this isn’t an obvious fucking come on. But Dean doesn’t do anything about it, just keeps Cas’ tie wrapped around his hand, not letting go and not pulling him any closer either. “What? I thought you said you wanted me?”

The strangled sound Cas makes in his throat would have Dean worried the guy had swallowed something down the wrong pipe, if this were any other time and place. As it is, it’s just very funny in the way only Cas can be. Like he coexists in Dean’s brain as this ancient unknowable fucking thing and some weird, dorky dude who stumbled into Dean’s life and never managed to stumble back out. Not for lack of trying, though.

“You never-” he says, like an accusation. Dean shrugs, avoids Cas’ eyes.

“Like I said. You didn’t ask.”

Dean has no fucking clue what Cas sees in his expression just then, but it must be enough because he doesn’t even have time to blink before Cas has leaned forward. That first touch of Cas’ mouth to his neck feels so good, Dean’s jaw slackens in surprise. Because he’s had his fair share of experience, when it comes to this stuff, but hell, it’s never felt like this. He’s never wanted someone so badly that the second they touch him, it feels like a dam bursting.

Dean leans his head back, but otherwise doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to break Cas out of whatever this is with questions or concerns or whatever the Hell else might put Dean back in his right head. Because right now he’s enjoying the feeling of Cas’ cold nose skating against his jaw as he pulls back, and then the knowledge that Cas’ mouth is inches from his. And in the long seconds before Cas starts to lean in again, all Dean can think is that Cas imagined this. Wanted him like this, and never brought it up. For fucking years. The enormity of that hits him when he sees the naked hunger in Cas’ eyes. He’s not sure he’s ever really wanted anything as badly as he wanted Cas to kiss him just then.

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly when Billie decides to start time back up again.

**Author's Note:**

> Gonna post part 2 as soon as it's done! Let me know if you like it so far!


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